Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/369

Rh must not kill its ambitions, but stimulate those ambitions by opening to them all possible opportunities. Their example will demonstrate that no man debases himself by lifting up his neighbor from ever so low a level.

They will also be able to show that, even supposing the average negro not to be able to reach the level of the average white man, the negro may reach a much higher level than he now occupies, and that, for his own good as well as the good of society, he should be brought up to as high a level as he can reach; and further, that the negro race has not only, since emancipation, accumulated an astonishing amount of property—nearly $800,000,000 worth in farms, houses and various business establishments—but has also produced not a few eminent men, eminent in literature, in medicine, in law, in mathematics, in theology, in educational work, in art, in mechanics—exceptional colored men, to be sure, but eminent men are exceptional in any race—who have achieved their successes under conditions so difficult and disheartening as to encourage the belief that they might have accomplished much more, and that many more such men would have come forth, had their environment been more just and the opportunities more favorable.

They would be able to banish the preposterous bugbear of “social equality” which frightens so many otherwise sensible persons in spite of the evident truth of Abraham Lincoln's famous saying that if he respected and advocated the just rights of the black man it did not follow that he must therefore take a black woman for his wife.

They might at the same time puncture those curious exaggerations of that dread of “social equality” which exhibit themselves in such childish follies as the attempt to make a heroine out of a silly hotel chambermaid who thought she did a proud thing in refusing to make Booker T. Washington's bed.