Those of us who grew up among the Negroes and have lived with them on terms of mutual kindness and of helpfulness all our lives are inclined to the conclusion that it is easy to exaggerate the progress of the Negro. The record of what we people of the South have done and have tried to do for the Negro during these fifty years is an open book to all the world. It need not be described or analyzed here. Our task has not been easy. In general, I think we have tried to do it in a way to win both the approval of our own conscience and the commendation of our fellow citizens of other sections of the country. Yet we have acted not only according to our means, but also according to our knowledge of what could be accomplished. In so far as we have failed we simply ask that our fellow citizens of the North and West make special effort to understand the true cause of our failure. This brings us to the main issue of this discussion. The Negro problem is not peculiar to the South. The Negro problem is the burden of the nation as a whole. The Negro was brought here during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the merchant ships which sailed mostly from the ports of Great Britain and New England. Some few put forth from Philadelphia and New York, but none from the South. This was not due to the fact that all Southern people were morally above taking advantage of the African slave trade. It was because commerce on the high seas was not developed in the South. We were then wholly agricultural. But the fact remains. The Negroes were brought to us by the ships of old England and New England. For this terrible error of all the English-speaking world of colonial times we in the South have paid and paid and paid. We have paid by reason of the very fact of slavery, which continued so long among us because no one knew how to make an end of it. We have paid and are still paying in the form of the most inefficient labor force in the world. We paid in the War Between the States and during the Reconstruction, until extinction threatened us; and we still pay. Not the least portion of our bill is the disesteem in which we are often so wrongly held by those of our own language and blood throughout the world. Yet we patiently await the day of complete understanding, of perfect reconciliation.