Is this true? Can any student be absolutely open minded? A seer is a receiver and revealer of truths. Such a being can possibly approach the consideration of a subject with an open mind. One may imagine Socrates so approaching a subject; but by what process, by what mental cathartic, does one, who studies, divest his mind of all preconceived ideas of the subject every time he considers a theory concerning that which has interested him sufficiently to lead him to seek to know more of it? No, the vast mass of us approach those subjects, when we are sincerely desirous of truth in the spirit of that individual who exclaimed to Christ—“Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” When the broken, beaten South attempted to frame the Codes, which no Negro has ever been able to consider judicially, the survivors could not possibly approach the condition they were in with an open mind. The greatest mind that has ever considered our great experiment in government, the French student De Tocqueville and that strong but shallower mind, that for so many years had with its resolutions overshadowed all others in the South, united in the dictum. Abolition means Africanization for the South. But the whites of the South were to a great extent British and Northern Irish in stock. They were eminently conservative. A stock greater in defeat than in victory, as history has shown the British to be. To obtain additional strength with which to withstand the flood of ignorance and incompetence let loose or about to break loose, they accepted the leadership of the poor white Andrew Johnson, despite the repugnance they felt for him, as keen and lively as any Englishman ever felt for Joe Chamberlain or Lloyd George or Ramsay McDonald. They did more. As far as legislation could affect it, they extended social equality to the least darkened of the dark race by which they were surrounded. The political principle, upon which they sought to adjust themselves to the changed condition, was based apparently upon the thought that if all the Southern whites and that proportion of the Colored population constituting about one-tenth, reasonably the most elevated in the minds of the theorists, from the fact that they closest approached the whites in physical texture, united, such union must strengthen the rulers even as it weakened the ruled. Dr. DuBois therefore is quite wrong when he intimates with some generosity, that the Black Codes were framed under hasty excitement, in declaring: “To be sure it was not a time to look for calm, cool, thoughtful action on the part of the white South.”[328]