It had always been
claimed, he said, that a white man is by nature, and not merely by
the adventitious circumstances of the past, innately and inherently,
and he would almost add infinitely, the superior of the colored
man. In intellectual culture, experience, habits of self-government
and command, this was unquestionably true. Whether it were true
as a natural and scientific fact was, perhaps, yet to be decided.
But could it be possible that a people, a race priding itself upon
its superiority, should be unwilling or afraid to see the experiment
fairly tried? "Have we," he asked, "so little confidence in
our moral and intellectual superiority that we dare not give the
colored man an equal right with us to exercise the privilege which
the Nation has conferred upon him? Are the white people of the
South so poor in intellectual resources that they must resort to
fraud or open violence to defeat the ignorant and weak colored man
of even the least of his law-given rights?
"We claim," he continued, "that he is ignorant. It is true. Are we
afraid that he will grow wiser than we? We claim that he has not
the capacity to acquire or receive a like intellectual development
with ourselves. Are we afraid to give him a chance to do so?
Could not intelligence cope with ignorance without fraud? Boasting
that we could outrun our adversary, would we hamstring him at the
starting-post? It was accounted by all men, in all ages, an unmanly
thing to steal, and a yet more unmanly thing to steal from the weak;
so that it has passed into a proverb, 'Only a dog would steal the
blind man's dinner.
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