Page:From servitude to service; (IA fromservitudetos00ogde).pdf/13

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Introduction
vii

A renascence of the national conscience in respect of the Negro is needed. It is important that questions of personal duty should not be obscured and bomb proofs created for cowardly minds by abstract discussions of fine distinctions, or of questions that are forever settled, concerning slavery and the Negro.

The moral responsibility for slavery, the comparative intellectual capacities of Anglo-Saxon and Negro, the alleged mistakes in Negro education, the vast political questions of which the emancipated race is the centre are not without importance, but they have nothing to do with questions of personal duty and obligation to a struggling race of American born people.

Slavery was a costly legacy for which the nation has paid dearly in numerous ways. Our forbears could have settled it all justly and cheaply. Our question, as an incident of the unwelcome bequest, is what will we do with it for our descendants. The adjustments that will keep peace and harmony between the two races living side by side, when the darker race will number twenty and forty millions, must be made now. Forty years ago American Negroes numbered about four millions, but now they count about ten millions. Our children will doubtless see the latter number doubled, and their children may see it doubled again.

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