DuBois thought Diagne and Candace, while unwavering defenders of racial opportunity, education for and the franchise for the civilized, “curiously timid” when the industrial problems of Africa “were” approached. Well so was the Negro, Martin R. Delany, candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina in 1874. He had had advantages for studying the African problems which Dr. DuBois had possibly not enjoyed to the same degree. Delany in his younger days had been an African explorer and, even if he had not penetrated very deeply into “The Dark Continent,” had seen the African Negro in his lair. He and his younger co-laborer for reform in South Carolina, William Hannibal Thomas, ex-Union soldier from Ohio, as has been narrated, supported the candidacy of Judge Green for governor of South Carolina, in 1874, against the brilliant white Carpet-Bagger Daniel H. Chamberlain and his lieutenant, the even less reputable black Carpet-Bagger, R. B. Elliott. But while Thomas accepted Chamberlain, in 1876, as a changed man, with regard to Chamberlain’s accompaniment, Delany, who had been in South Carolina since 1865, eleven years to Thomas’s three, was still “curiously timid.” DuBois later enlarged his experience by a trip to Africa and, before that, possibly may have been moved by the work of a French Negro scholar who had made some mark in the literary world and occasioned some stir in French colonial politics, just after the Pan-African congress. But upon his return from these in 1921 DuBois at once addressed himself to the consideration of President Harding’s Birmingham speech. With a curious sympathy for the man, Harding, and a display of rank ingratitude to that white leader who had dared to do more for the Negro, than Harding thought became a white man, DuBois declared: “The President made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William H. Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of.... Mr. Harding meant that the American Negro must acknowledge that it was wrong and a disgrace for Booker T. Washington to dine with President Roosevelt.”[380] Although thus praising the President and with a wholly gratuitous sneer at the dead Roosevelt who had dared the “disgrace” and suffered for it, the Doctor asserted Harding’s “braver clearer utterance” was “an inconceivably dangerous and undemocratic demand,” which he disposes of with one sweep of his pen, which not only wiped out Harding’s speech; but also brushed away the basis upon which John Stuart Mill erected his political economy, to wit—“the first impulse of mankind is to follow and obey, servitude rather than freedom is their natural state.” Not so in the view of Dr. DuBois: “No system of social uplift which begins by denying the manhood of a man can end by giving him a free ballot, a real education and a just wage.”[381]