privilege and prosperity.  It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without rhyme or reason.  It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an irreconcilable violence.  It matters not that no two races, however similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil with equal rights in peace!  In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American prejudice—­to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks—­and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history.  And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—­a rigor that accepts no excuse—­and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity.  We do not shrink from this trial.  It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—­so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could.  Can we solve it?  The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know.  But this the weakest and wisest of us do know:  we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy—­with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood—­and that, when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving hearts!

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South—­the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—­whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—­whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes—­these men wear this problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night.  They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means—­what they owe to this kindly and dependent race—­the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery.  And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage.  Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!

Such is the temper of my people.  But what of the problem itself?  Mr. President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point.  If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with