organic law, emboldens those kites of commerce, whose despotic aggressions are destructive alike of national and individual values, and who are themselves a standing menace to the American doctrine of equality of right in every department of commercial enterprise; that compassing the defeat of the national polity in favor of their people has invited, stimulated, and popularized the lawlessness of race-antagonism, which is not less systematized by the industrial element North and East, than it is legitimated by popular opinion South and West.
The Brotherhood do not affect to suppress their anxiety lest their people should remain stationary in the midst of a rapidly advancing nation.
They believe that for the African just emerging from conditions which the barbarities of two centuries of slavery had established, and not yet lifted above the vices incident to that system; whose every step of progress has been antagonized and retarded; who is forever exposed to the malign influence of the intrigue and imposture of spoil-hunting political adventurers, the heavenly light of education, which teaches him to become an upright, valuable member of society, happy in himself and useful to others, is a Christian instrumentality which will prove in the end the most effective policy to fit him for a radically changed order of things, and for the true functions of American citizenship.
The Brotherhood insist that all the sectional evils attendant upon the change of the status of this race are owing to its state of transition, and that these drawbacks are but temporary and of far less magnitude than the sociological disabilities which slavery entailed upon the whole body politic. They invite attention to what such Southern authors as Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris have chronicled respecting the wonderful devotion and self-abnegation, the rare fidelity, the delicacy, the untaught chivalry, the noble virtues, of the old family servants who guarded the infancy and early youth of the Southron under the old régime; and they insist, that what the descendants of those trusty servants require to fit them for the new conditions of their high place as American citizens, is that which the greatest law-givers, statesmen, and political philosophers and the most
