Back of all our projects to bring the negroes of the South to the full station of citizens, to get rid of the contempt and the consequences of the contempt in which they are, as a race, so generally held, is the grave question as to the practicability of framing a social and political system in which men of such diverse origin may have a substantially equal chance. It must be granted that in no modern state of high grade has this problem been fairly solved. The instances from the tropical colonies of Great Britain are not really apposite; but there seems no fundamental difficulty to contend with in order to attain this end. With cultivated people of their own race about them the better negro youth would not be deprived of that element of education. We have taken into our political family races scarcely less different in motives from our own than are the negroes, making no kind of objection to their sharing the commonwealth with us. In certain ways it is true that a nation loses strength where it fails to have its elements closely knit together. But it may be doubted whether these losses are not more than compensated for by the gains that arise from diversities such as would come from the introduction into our system of a body of folk with the capacities which our Africans are likely with thorough training to develop. In this matter there are but two courses open to us--one of folly, the other of wisdom. We may leave the black people to work out their own salvation as best they may, to lie as a mass at the bottom of our society, except so far as the abler men who may arise among them help their struggling fellows. The result of this will be the perpetuation of all the existing evils. Or we may set to work, after the true manner of our folk, with the full knowledge that the task is very great, but that we have the strength to see it done. With this spirit we may accomplish the noblest work that men have ever undertaken in any nation. To the people of the South we may fairly say: “These negroes were brought here by your forefathers, and thus tied to the land. In their training as slaves, they were given an opportunity to rise far above their primitive savagery. You have seen in serious trials how, as a race, they are trustworthy. They are now your fellow-citizens in name, but are in a condition to be a permanent menace to your commonwealth. Properly aided on their way upward, they may be of great value to your descendants.” To the people of the North we may plead for all the help they can give; for hardly less than the Southerners, their ancestors shared in the actions which brought the negroes to this country. They gave the blacks the semblance of citizenship by the process of emancipation. If the work stops there, it may be questioned whether it was a boon to the masses of the folk it made nominally free. To be what it was meant to be, then, it needs more than enactments. There must be long continued and devoted labor, wisely directed.