Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time.  One is, Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is, Will they fight for their freedom?  An affirmative answer to these must be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent security in law or opinion.  Whatever may be the theses of philosophers or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have not industry sufficient to support themselves.  Nor, in the present development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure, because they have not the pluck to defend themselves.  Sentiment may be lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted.  Like all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to be an estate of the realm, and not before.  Let us, then, take the world as we find it, and try this people accordingly.  But it is not pertinent to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art, literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to glow upon their history.  No Iliad may be written of them and their woes.  No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes.  No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms.  How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture.  It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions.  To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to ordinary humanity.

It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise it, to make a new chapter of human experience.  The past may suggest, but it can do little either in directing or deterring.  There is nothing in the gloomy vaticinations of Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is, which should be permitted to darken our future.  The mediaeval antagonisms of races, when Christianity threw but a partial light over mankind, and before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests among people of diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the richer and more various development of modern life.  Nor do the results of emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they may be, afford any measure of the progress which opens before our enfranchised masses.  The insular and contracted life of the colonies, cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism, has no parallel in the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through the continent on which our problem is to be solved.