The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout the length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the coloured citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but who save President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights, duties with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt ever paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of lynching (a stain on the Nation’s honour and a blight on the Nation’s rectitude) to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to deliver up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race, and his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years ago an acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and trapped a negro criminal. For this he received his full measure of commendation; but he also received threatening letters from other negroes whose simple conception of a policeman’s part was the giving of shelter and protection to offenders of his own race. The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was the cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the negroes’ souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and took kindly to their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a controlling factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern States with labour. That four fifths of the labourers were better off in America than they would have been in Africa was a circumstance equally unfit to be offered as a palliative by civilized men. The inherent injustice of slavery lay too deep for vindication. But now that the great wrong has been righted (and that three hundred thousand white men laid down their lives in the righting is a fact which deserves to be remembered), now that the American negroes are free, Christian, educated, and privileged (like artists and authors) to earn their daily bread, they cannot candidly regret that their remote ancestors had not been left unmolested on the coast of Guinea. They have their grievances; but they are the most fortunate of their race. The debt the white men owed them has been paid. There is left a mutual dependence on the law, a mutual obligation of self-imposed decency of behaviour from which not even voters are exempt.