One of these principles is the absolute and unchangeable superiority of the white race—a superiority, it appears to him, not due to any mere adventitious circumstances, such as superior educational and other advantages during some centuries, but an inherent and essential superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy. He does not believe that the Negro is the equal of the white, or ever could be the equal. Race superiority is founded on courage (or, perhaps, “constancy” is the better word), intellect, and the domestic virtues, and in these the white is the superior of every race. Another principle is that many, if not most, of the difficulties of the race problem since the war have been caused, or at least increased, by the ignorance of those outside of the South, who, most cocksure of their position where they were most in error, have tried to force a solution on lines contrary to natural and unchangeable laws. The selfish politician and the cocksure theorist have equally contrived to create problems where none might have been but for their bigotry and their folly. The first step toward the solution of the problem would be taken if the Negro were simply let alone and left to his own resources, with such help as equity or philanthropy might contribute—in other words, if the whites and blacks were left to settle their difficulties and troubles in the various States and sections precisely as they would be left were all whites or all blacks. Among the errors made in the early years none was more fatal than the inculcation in the mind of the Negro that he was the ward of the nation, and, as such, would be sustained. He was not sustained in the end and he never can be; but he learned just enough from the experience of that time to know that the Government was powerful enough to trample down the Southern whites. The memory of that time has been an _ignis fatuus_ to delude him ever since. And the continual harping on this theme by the section of the Northern press and the politicians, who forget that this is no longer the decade following the war, is just sufficient to mislead them. At the end the Negroes must rise by their own exertions and their own approach to the standards by which peoples rise. And the chief aid in this is the sympathy of those among whom they live. Left alone, the whites and the blacks of the South would settle their difficulties along the lines of substantial justice and substantial equity. Yet another principle is that the final settlement must be one in which the great body of that portion of the white race who know the Negroes best shall acquiesce. No other will ever be final.