the life of her people, is beginning to be more careful in her
deportment and is no longer the easy victim of the unlicensed passion
of certain white men. This is a great gain and is a sign of real
progress, for no race can rise higher than its women.

Let me plead with the friends of the negro. Please continue to give
him higher ideals of a better life and stand by him in the struggle.
He has done well with the opportunities given him and is doing
something along all the walks of life to help himself, which is
gratitude of the best sort. What he needs to-day is moral sympathy,
which in his condition years ago he could hardly appreciate. The
sympathy must be moral, not necessarily social. It must be the
sympathy of a soul set on fire for righteousness and fair play in a
republic like ours. A sympathy which will see to it that every man
shall have a man's chance in all the affairs of this great nation
which boasts of being the land of the free and the home of the brave
for which the black man has suffered and done so much in every sense
of the word.

Let this great Christian nation of eighty millions of people do
justice to the Black Battalion, and seeing President Roosevelt
acknowledges that he overstepped the bounds of his power in
discharging and renouncing them before they had a fair trial, and now
that they are vindicated before the world, to take back what he called
them, Cutthroats, Brutal Murderers, Black Midnight Assassins, and
Cowards. This and this alone will to some extent atone for the wrong
he has done and help him to regain the respect and confidence of the
world.

Now in order to change the condition of things, I would suggest: