The black and white citizens of the South must alter the lines which have divided them since the close of the war.  They are, essentially, one people, and should be mutual aids instead of mutual hindrances to each other.  By “one people” I don’t wish to be understood as implying that the white and black man are one in an ethnological, but a generic sense, having a common origin.  Living in the same communities, pursuing identical avocations, and subject to the same fundamental laws, however these may differ in construction and application in the several States, it is as much, if not even more, the interest of the white man that the black should be given every possible opportunity to better his mental, material and civil condition.  Society is not corrupted from the apex but from the base.  It is not the pure rain that falls from the heavens, but the stagnant waters of the pool, that breed disease and death.  The corruption of the ballot by white men of the South is more pernicious than the misuse of it by black men; the perversion of the law in the apprehension and punishment of criminals, by being wielded almost exclusively against colored men, not only brings law into contempt of colored men but encourages crime among white men.  Thus the entire society is corrupted.  Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.  When men find that laws are purposely framed to oppress and defraud them they become desperate and reckless; and mob law, by usurping the rightful functions of the judiciary, makes criminals of honest men.  As Alexander Pope expressed it: 

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, That to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet, seen too oft, familiar with his face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The South has nothing to gain and everything to lose in attempting to repress the energies and ambition of the colored man.  It is to the safety as well as to the highest efficiency of society that all its members should be allowed the same opportunities for moral, intellectual and material development.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  There is no escape from the law of God.  You either deal justly or suffer the evil effects of wrong-doing.  The disorders which have made the South a seething cauldron for fifteen years have produced the most widespread contempt of lawful authority not only on the part of the lawless whites but the law-abiding blacks, who have suffered patiently the infliction of all manner of wrong because they were a generation of slaves, suddenly made freemen.  They permitted themselves to be shot because they had been educated to bare their backs at the command of the white oligarch.  But that sort of pusillanimous cowardice cannot be expected to last always.  Men in a state of freedom instinctively question the right of others to impose unequal burdens upon them, or to deny to them equal and exact protection of the laws.  When oppressed people begin to murmur, grow restless and discontented, the opposer had better change his tactics, or lock himself up, as does the cowardly tyrant of Russia.