The question is often asked, “Now that the race problem in the South has been laid down and discussed, what solution of it do you offer—what have you to propose to ameliorate the conditions which have grown out of that problem?” The answer is simple. None, but to leave it to work itself out along the lines of economic laws, with such aid as may be rendered by an enlightened public spirit and a broad-minded patriotism. The solution proposed so glibly by ignorant doctrinaires is like the nostrum of the quack—good only for fools. The single solution that can really solve it is that which time alone can disclose—the natural and imperative resultant of the forces represented in the two races. The racial traits, instincts, and forces which have governed and propelled them since the dawn of history will in all human probability still control and propel them so long as they exist as races. One fact that may be stated with some degree of assurance is that there is no one universal Negro problem or question except the single one constituted by the existence in the same country of two populous and fecund races, essentially and, perhaps, radically different in their history, manners, life, and instincts. In fact, the problems are almost as numerous and as various as the communities where the two races exist side by side. For example, one problem exists where the races are equally educated; another, where they are equally ignorant; a third, where the one race or the other is in numerical superiority; yet another, where the members of either race are of one class or another. All of these things have to be fully considered in determining the various questions that seem to be inherent in the subject, and any positive formulation of one set of conditions may readily be met by the production of a partially if not a totally different set of conditions. Out of all these questions, as has been stated, but one essentially common to the whole obtrudes itself: Whether two races, like the white race and the black, with such histories and such characteristics as those races have, can continue permanently to live together under conditions similar to those which exist in the United States with mutual benefit to both? On the proper answer to this question depends our future, both as a people and as a nation. Next to the question of Representative government, this would appear to be the most vital and fundamental question that exists within the limits of the United States to-day. Hinging upon it are such subordinate questions as representation, personal security, freedom of speech, race integrity, national strength and permanency, and, possibly, even national existence.