The three fundamental duties of the white man, according to Judge Hammond, of Atlanta, are to see “that his own best interest lies in the cultivation of friendly relations with the negro.... To treat the negro with absolute fairness and justice ... advising him and counseling him about the important affairs of his everyday life.” These duties lie upon the white man because, as Thomas Nelson Page states it: “Unless the whites lift the Negroes up, the Negroes will drag them down.”

Nobody, white or black, North or South, is able to point out any single positive means by which the two races are both to have their full development and yet to live in peace. Every positive and quick-acting remedy when examined is found invalid. Violence of language or of behavior of both sides does nothing whatever to remove the real difficulties. The agencies of uplift are slow and uncertain and nobody can positively predict that they will do the work. The South, with all its magnificent resources, is far behind the other sections of the Union, both in wealth and productive power. It can only take its proper place in the Union by raising the average character and energy of its people—of all its people—for it cannot be done by improving either race while the other remains stationary.

In a word, the remedy is patience. Dark as things look in the South, it is subject to mighty forces. In many ways the strongest influence for peace and concord in the South is simply self-interest. The most intelligent and thoughtful men in the South see clearly that unless the people can be made to improve, the section will always lag behind. Side by side with this force is the spirit of humanity, of practical Christianity, which forbids that millions of people shall be cut off from the agencies of evangelization. The South is behind no other part of the country in a sense of the greatness of moral forces.

From every point of view, the obvious thing for the South is to make the best of its condition and not the worst, to give opportunities of uplift to all those who can appropriate them, to raise the negro race to as high a point as it is capable of occupying. This is a long, hard process, full of disappointment and perhaps of bitterness. The problem is not soluble in the sense that anyone can foresee a wholly peaceful and contented community divided into two camps; but the races can live alongside, and coöperate, though one be superior to the other. That superiority only throws the greater responsibility on the upper race. Nobody has ever given better advice to the South than Senator John Sharp Williams—“In the face of this great problem it would be well that wise men think more, that good men pray more, and that all men talk less and curse less.” In that spirit the problem will be solved, because it will be manfully confronted.

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