“I don’t know as there will ever be any change,” sez I, lookin’ dreamily off beyend Col. Seybert into the everlastin’ strangeness of things present and things to come—“I don’t know as there will ever be any change in that particiler, for the Bible sez expressly:
“‘The poor you always have with you.’
“And always means always, I spoze; and poor means poor in every sense of the word, I have calculated.
“And that text applies to black and white folks alike.
“But as I have said prior and heretofore, if the colored people have done so well in the last twenty-five years, in spite of all the burdens and hindrances of race prejudice and the weights that unjust laws impose on ’em, by the hatred and envy of them that can’t bear to see their prosperity—if they have done so well in the chill and the dark, as you may say, what can’t they do when they come out in the light and the warmth of a place where sure rewards wait upon honest labor—where the atmosphere is helpful, and inspirin’, and hopeful, instead of icy, and draggin’ down, and chokin’, and stiflin’.
“Where their color is fashionable, and not a badge of disgrace.
“Where their rulers will be them that love ’em and seek their best good, their own people, their peers, only wiser and more helpful than they be—as the Declaration of Independence sez free men must be, in a free land, judged by their peers, their equals.
“Where there will not be dishonest members of an alien and dominant race to step in and steal their first poor earnings in the name of law or might, or both.
“Where their daughters, if beautiful, will be free from their ruler’s lust, and their small possessions safe from his avarice.
“If in the last quarter of a century in this persecuted, hampered state they have been able to accumulate, in one of the worst States of the Union for them, six million dollars’ worth of property, what can they do in the next twenty years, when their labor and their persons will be protected by the law, and they will be encouraged by wise advice, and their intellects and reason enriched and broadened by education and means of culture?”