Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. To-day, when
new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of
the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this
legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know:
despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.
In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he
may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the
whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law
and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only
escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured
sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated
servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the
courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and
peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of
their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature
must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large
legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do
because it could not.


I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children
sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with
harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a
figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps
hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three
centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that
bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the
duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is
the problem of the color-line.