Finally, the title of this chapter has a wider significance which I would emphasize with all possible vigor. In maintaining that the Negro is a ward of the nation I wish to place emphasis upon WARD. The Negro's presence among us requires an ever greater interest and care on our part. It is high time that the people of the South made a wider appeal to their fellow citizens of the North and West. A stupendous moral responsibility is involved in the presence of these ten millions of black people. Not only the past, but the future, too, is looking down upon us. All Americans may well realize that in this, as in so many other matters, we are being weighed in the balance as a nation. As a people we are fortunate in being quick to let bygones be bygones. We of the South know that if other sections come to understand us and our peculiar problem better, not only we, but they also, will be the ultimate gainers. The sooner the nation unites in looking upon our ten millions of colored folk as ten millions of children for whose protection and care we are morally responsible, the sooner we shall all be placed upon solid ground. Let me repeat here what I have been constantly touching upon in these chapters. The maxims of our democracy are not for universal application. Some Europeans are a hundred years, others five hundred years, behind us in the process of democratic evolution. We may guess, but we can not know, how long they will be in catching up. How far behind them the Negro may be in these things I leave for the anthropologists to determine or surmise. But what we of the South assuredly know, because of our experience, is just this--to treat the Negro as the political equal of the white is to do grave injustice not only to the white, but to the Negro as well. We can not justly enforce the laws among children that we make for adults. To enforce the white man's law, in all cases, upon the Negro is an injustice so great that the effort often causes sorrow to every normal mind among us. Cared for and protected as a child, the Negro's better qualities are developed and made evident by his works. But when he is burdened by moral and legal responsibilities which neither his mind nor his character is prepared to bear, in the vast majority of cases he breaks and falls under the load. The errors of our mistaken policies during the past fifty years have caused unfathomable suffering among our Negroes. Our country took its foolish fling and sowed its wild oats of democratic Utopia during Reconstruction days. We proved then that the vote is an unmitigated curse to the Negro. From this curse he still suffers. We were forced by Federal act to make him everywhere subject to the white man's civil and criminal law. Often enough the white man's law sends him to the penitentiary for twenty years when twenty days of hard work upon the public highway would be punishment enough for his unthinking crime. In this matter we have simply tried to put a gallon