It springs out of a desire to throw off just responsibility and to evade the performance of disagreeable but manifest duty. Its natural effect and purpose is to divert attention from the true issue now before the American people. It does this by holding up and pre-occupying the public mind with an issue entirely different from the real one in question. That which is really a great national problem and which ought to be so considered by the whole American people, dwarfs into a “Negro Problem.” The device is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated and with a similar purpose and effect. For truth, it gives us falsehood. For innocence, it gives us guilt. It removes the burden of proof from the old master class and imposes it upon the Negro. It puts upon the race a work which belongs to the nation. It belongs to that craftiness often displayed by disputants who aim to make the worse appear the better reason. It gives bad names to good things and good names to bad things. The Negro has often been the victim to this kind of low cunning. You may remember that during the late war, when the South fought for the perpetuity of slavery, it usually called the slaves “domestic servants,” and slavery a “domestic institution.” Harmless names, indeed, but the things they stood for were far from harmless. The South has always known how to have a dog hanged by giving him a bad name. When it prefixed “Negro” to the national problem, it knew that the device would awaken and increase a deep-seated prejudice at once and that it would repel fair and candid investigation. As it stands, it implies that the Negro is the cause of whatever trouble there is in the South. In old slave times, when a little white child lost his temper, he was given a little whip and told to go and whip “Jim” or “Sal,” and he thus regained his temper. The same is true to-day on a large scale. I repeat, and my contention is that this Negro problem formula lays the fault at the door of the Negro and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty and blames the innocent, makes the Negro responsible, when it should so make the nation. Now what the real problem is, we all ought to know. It is not a Negro problem, but in every sense a great national problem. It involves the question, whether after all our boasted civilization, our Declaration of Independence, our matchless Constitution, our sublime Christianity, our wise statesmanship, we as a people, possess virtue enough to solve this problem in accordance with wisdom and justice, and to the advantage of both races.