Excerpt from The Future of the Colored Race

I do not appear before the faculty and students of the Agricultural and Mechan ical College to discuss what the newspapers and politicians call the race question in the Southern United States. What is here called the race problem, under another form, is equally pressing in the Northern States of the Union. It is only one section of the radical problem raised by that new departure in human affairs, the original Declaration of American Independence, fought out through eight terrible years of the war of the Revolution, and finally embodied in the Constitution of a republican government for the United States of America, declared, substantially, by Mr. Gladstone to be the most remarkable achievement of original statesmanship ever struck out by any body of men in the history of mankind.

The motive power of that new government and order of society, now a century old - the great political dynamo that generates the force which moves and illumines the national life - is the radical idea, then for the first time deliberately adopted by any government, that it is possible to construct a nationality in which all orders and conditions of people can live together, each man, woman, and child a vital part of the whole, every member protected in all the fundamental rights of human nature, including the sovereign right to strive for his own highest possibility of man hood or womanhood, and all working together for the common good.

That lofty idea of our new American nationality is only the translation into pub lic affairs of the idea of human-nature and possibility announced by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, and the Law of Love. After an eighteen-century struggle upward out of the darkness of a paganism which held to the fundamental heresy of antiquity that every superior man was a brevet deity and all the rest of the world human trash, in the fullness of time this great American new departure sent greeting back to Palestine and began the mighty experiment of educating all orders and conditions of people upward toward that American sovereign citizenship, which truly achieved is the loftiest posi tion in the world, made possible to every son and daughter of God.

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