Not only, however, our indomitable instinct, but an urgent reason makes this our foremost consideration. National responsibilities, great civic or industrial responsibilities we are as yet cut off from. Through _private relations then we must educate ourselves to the realization, that only through the just performance of duties can true rights be won_. As we perform our trust over a few things will we perform our trust over many. Already we are reminded that our claims as individuals are mixed with those of the mass of our people. In vain we urge our greater culture or refinement, we are judged by the average of our race. In our own interest then, if not from a higher motive, we must turn to the lifting of our fellows. Our solidarity is already great: let us hold to it and increase it. Far from being a curse it is a people’s greatest blessing. Yet we are losing it; our fellow sympathy and active helpfulness are not as great as were our fathers’. This is of crucial importance, since our best chance of winning friends among the women and poor of the other race is by justice to the women and poor of our own. And it is the women and the poor of the other race that we need most to win: for it were hard to say which is the greater obstacle to our progress, those left behind among the race ahead, or those left behind among our own. We must face sex inequality and class inequality among ourselves, _lest we bitterly denounce others’ injustice when the same spirit of uncharitableness is deep buried in our own natures_. Why is there such intense emphasis placed upon this issue of social equality? Largely because it arouses the jealousy of the white woman and the white poor. She, with her heart full of fear and distrust, is the first to shut the door upon the stranger. The next step after being a slave is wanting one; and she, who has been for untold ages in forced servitude to man clings jealously to that social order which provides a place for another more to be pitied than she. She, it is who holds the keys of the home, and with them, of church, school, restaurant, theatre and car.