At the same meeting in which Dr. DuBois read his bold, elaborate and interesting defense of Congressional Reconstruction, the author of this study submitted, on request, a paper on the Negro question, in accordance with the limitations, which, while accepted and edited for publication by the Board, was not permitted publication in the Report of the Historical Association, Mr. Charles D. Walcott having the power to exclude it from such, and using the power. That the skeleton piece of 1750 words was to some slight degree critical of the East is not to be denied; but if the Eastern scholars rose above their prejudices when presented with truth why could not the official? The gist of the little paper when printed does not appear very inflammatory. “Says a distinguished Northern writer—‘The North is learning every day by valuable experiences that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races.’ Certainly nothing has afforded such an opportunity for the North to acquire these valuable experiences day by day, as the diffusion of the Negroes throughout the Union. Meanwhile as the masses in the South are reduced the Negroes will not constitute, to the degree they now do, the criminal class; their good qualities must become more noticeable and their bad ones excite less that intense or contemptuous regard, which has, in the minds of many Southern men, made Negro and criminal almost synonymous terms. The war made the Negro question a national question, and it is too late to say—‘the man of the South must be trusted to work out this (the evolution of the Negro race to higher conditions) in his own good time’ and that ‘he is charged with the burden and must bear it.’ That is a sectional attitude just to neither the Negro nor the white man of the South. In time and with greatly reduced numbers of the Negroes about him, the Southern white man may change the view, which inheritance of ideas almost forces him to hold, viz., that the Negro is essentially servile; but that is his sentiment today; and while, therefore, he may be best fitted to rule him as such, he is not constituted to assist him in the evolution to a higher condition. As they spread out, the Negroes must come more and more in contact with all grades of our civilization and from such draw the lessons best adapted to their own development. The sentiment therefore, which would deny them this; which would seek to confine the masses to the South, deciding for them that it is their natural home and having but little sympathy for them beyond the pale, is in my opinion, the greatest obstacle to their advancement and, to some degree, a cause of moral deterioration of the higher race.”[347]