“There are hundreds if not thousands of black men in this country who in capacity are to be ranked with the superior persons of the dominant race; and it is hard to say that in any evident feature of mind they characteristically differ from their white fellow citizens.”[45]

Prof. Shaler is himself a Southerner, a professor in Harvard University, and a noted student of current problems.

“Granting the present inferiority of the Negro, we affirm that it has never been proved; nor is there any good reason to suppose that he is doomed forever to maintain his present relative position, or that he is inferior to the white man in any other sense than as some white races are inferior to others.”[46]

“Yet the Negro children exhibit no intellectual inferiority; they make just the same progress in the subjects taught as do the children of white parents, and the deficiency they exhibit later in life is of quite a different kind.”[47]

Mr. Hoffman compels us once more to combat the arguments of the slave holding class: that is, that the Negro is intellectually and morally an inferior creature (they did not, however, affirm physical inferiority) and that it is only by servile contact with the white race that his nature can be improved. The progress along these lines which the race has made even under the severest disadvantages is sufficient answer to this argument.

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave, By nature’s law designed, Why was an independent wish E’er planted in my mind?

By nature’s law designed,

E’er planted in my mind?

[Pg 25]The Negro’s intellectual and social environments hang as a millstone about his neck; and when he is cast upon the sea of opportunity he is reproached with everlasting inferiority because he does not swim an equal race with those who are not thus fettered. We are reminded of the barbarous Teutons in Titus Andronicus who, after pulling out the tongue and cutting off the hands of the lovely Lavinia, upbraid her for not calling for sweet water with which to wash her delicate hands.

[Pg 25]

No, no, Mr. Hoffman, the philanthropists have made no mistake. They have proceeded on the supposition that the Negro has faculty for faculty and power for power with the rest of his fellow men, and that his special needs grow out of his peculiar condition. Any alteration in this 

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