that prejudice was a big stubborn entity which had to be taken into
account. He went on to say: "This idea you have of making a Negro out
of yourself is nothing more than a sentiment; and you do not realize
the fearful import of what you intend to do. What kind of a Negro
would you make now, especially in the South? If you had remained
there, or perhaps even in your club in New York, you might have
succeeded very well; but now you would be miserable. I can imagine no
more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined
colored man in the United States. I have given more study to the race
question in the United States than you may suppose, and I sympathize
with the Negroes there; but what's the use? I can't right their
wrongs, and neither can you; they must do that themselves. They are
unfortunate in having wrongs to right, and you would be foolish to
take their wrongs unnecessarily on your shoulders. Perhaps some day,
through study and observation, you will come to see that evil is
a force, and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot
annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and
hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in
scattering it into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great
civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred
between sections of the country: in the South, into political
corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through
peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation
of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation
of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the
future may bring. Modern civilization hit ignorance of the masses
through the means of popular education. What has it done but turn
ignorance into anarchy, socialism, strikes, hatred between poor and
rich, and universal discontent? In like manner, modern philanthropy
hit at suffering and disease through asylums and hospitals; it