There is one that with us overshadows all the rest.  The great Anglo-Saxon race in the section of this country containing the inhabitants of the South understands better than you do the gravity of that great problem which confronts them.  It is “like the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”  It confronts us all the day; it is the spectre that ever sits beside our bed.  No doubt we make mistakes about it; no doubt there are outbreaks growing out of some phases of it that astound, and shock, and stun you, as they do ourselves.  But believe me, the Anglo-Saxon race has set itself, with all its power, to face it and to overcome it; to solve it in some way, and in the wisest way.  Have patience and it will be solved.  Time is the great solver, and time alone.  If you knew the problem as I do, my words would have more weight with you than they have.  I cannot, perhaps, expect you even to understand entirely what I am saying to you, but when I tell you that it is the greatest problem that at present faces the South, as it has done for the last thirty years, I am saying it to you as an American—­one of yourselves, who wants to get at the right, and get at the truth, and who will get on his knees and thank God for anyone who will tell him how to solve the problem and meet the dangers that are therein.

Those dangers are not only for us, they are for you.  The key to it, in our opinion, is that to which I alluded but just now; that for the present, at least, the white race is the torch-bearer of civilization, not only for itself, but for the world.  There is only one thing that I can say assuredly, and that is that never again will that element of the white race, the white people of the South, any more than you of the North, consent to be dominated by any weaker race whatsoever.  And on this depends your salvation, no less than ours.  Some of you may remember that once, during that great siege of Petersburg, which resulted, in the beginning of April, 1865, in the capture of the city and the overthrow of the Confederacy, there was an attempt made to mine the hitherto impregnable lines of General Lee.  Finally, one cold morning, the mine was sprung, and a space perhaps double the length of one of your squares was blown up, carrying everything adjacent into the air and making a breach in the lines.  Beside a little stream under the hill in the Union lines was massed a large force, a section of which, in front, was composed of negroes.  They were hurried forward to rush the breach that had been created.  They were wild with the ardor of battle.  As it happened, a part of the gray line which had held the adjacent trenches, knowing the peril, had thrown themselves, in the dim dawn of the morning, across the newly made breach, and when they found the colored troops rushing in they nerved themselves anew to the contest.  I may say to you calmly, after thirty odd years of experience with the negro race, that it was well for the town of Petersburg