Problems of Today Author:Moorfield Storey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RACE PREJUDICE In my last lecture, while discussing the importance of obeying the law and giving instances of lawlessness, I said that there was another consp... more »icuous instance. I propose now to speak of that, as it is an example of the race and class prejudice which is a fruitful source of danger to this country. The true principle on which government by the people should rest is expressed in the phrase, "Each for all and all for each." The enlightened citizen should learn to put himself in his neighbor's place, see with his eyes, and thus instructed consider what is good for his neighbor's interest as well as for his own. Any other course is blind selfishness. The prospects of peace and prosperity all over the world are clouded by injustice arising from racial and class antipathies, and in our own country the former is intensified by the prejudice of color, a legacy from the dayswhen negro slavery existed in this country. Let me deal with this first. The census of 1800 showed that the population of the United States was 5,308,433 persons of whom nearly one-fifth were negro slaves. In 1860 the slave population in the nine seceding states was about 3,500,000 out of 9,000,000, and taking the other slave states the total slave population was about 4,000,000. To-day we roughly estimate the negro population of the country at about twelve millions. These twelve millions of people are citizens of the United States, entitled under the Constitution to every right which any white citizen enjoys, and by the Fifteenth Amendment protected in their right to vote, against any discrimination founded on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. They are called upon to perform every duty of a citizen, to pay taxes, to serve in the army, to hold their property subject to the right o...« less