the religious sentiment of that city which made such an act possible? A
friend of mine who does mission work in your city, some time since,
found a young woman in the slums and applied at the door of a midnight
mission for fallen women, and asked if colored girls could be received,
and was curtly answered, 'no.' For her in that mission there was no room.
The love of Christ constrained no hand to strive to rescue her from the
depths of degradation. The poor thing went from bad to worse till at
last, wrecked and blighted, she went down to an early grave the victim
of strong drink. That same lady found on her mission a white girl;
seeing a human soul adrift, regardless of color, she went, in company
with some others, to that same mission with the poor castaway; to her
the door was opened without delay and ready admittance granted. But I
might go on reciting such instances until you would be weary of hearing
and I of relating them; but I appeal to you as a patriot and Christian,
is it not fearfully unwise to keep alive in freedom the old animosities
of slavery? To-day the Negro shares citizenship with you. He is not
arraying himself against your social order; his hands are not dripping
with dynamite, nor is he waving in your face the crimson banners of
anarchy, but he is increasing in numbers and growing in intelligence,
and is it not madness and folly to subject him to social and public
inequalities, which are calculated to form and keep alive a hatred of
race as a reaction against pride of caste?"

"Mr. Thomas, you have given me a new view of the matter. To tell you the
truth, we have so long looked upon the colored man as a pliable and
submissive being that we have never learned to look at any hatred on his
part as an element of danger, and yet I should be sorry to know that by
our Southern supineness we were thoughtlessly helping create a black
Ireland in our Gulf States, that in case the fires of anarchy should
ever sweep through our land, that a discontented and disaffected people