and aid in the struggle they are making. We are charged with the sacred
duty of making their path as smooth and easy as we can. Any recognition
of their distinguished men, any appointment to office from among their
number, is properly taken as an encouragement and an appreciation of
their progress, and this just policy should be pursued when suitable
occasion offers.

But it may well admit of doubt whether, in the case of any race, an
appointment of one of their number to a local office in a community in
which the race feeling is so widespread and acute as to interfere with
the ease and facility with which the local government business can be
done by the appointee is of sufficient benefit by way of encouragement
to the race to outweigh the recurrence and increase of race feeling
which such an appointment is likely to engender. Therefore the
Executive, in recognizing the negro race by appointments, must exercise
a careful discretion not thereby to do it more harm than good. On the
other hand, we must be careful not to encourage the mere pretense of
race feeling manufactured in the interest of individual political
ambition.

Personally, I have not the slightest race prejudice or feeling, and
recognition of its existence only awakens in my heart a deeper sympathy
for those who have to bear it or suffer from it, and I question the
wisdom of a policy which is likely to increase it. Meantime, if nothing
is done to prevent it, a better feeling between the negroes and the
whites in the South will continue to grow, and more and more of the
white people will come to realize that the future of the South is to be
much benefited by the industrial and intellectual progress of the
negro. The exercise of political franchises by those of this race who
are intelligent and well to do will be acquiesced in, and the right to