largely on this American experiment, but especially a respon-
sibility to this nation,--this common Fatherland. It is wrong
to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to
aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular
not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconcilia-
tion between the North and South after the frightful difference
of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratula-
tion to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused
the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the
industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men,
with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then
those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by
every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a
course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition
involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We
have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are
sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and
white.

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South
discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are
not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly
hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indis-
criminate endorsement of the recent course of the South
toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of
the South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the
ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are
fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today
perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.
Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South