We have never conformed with that class of
philosophers who would keep the people in ignorance, lest they might
change their opinion from former predilections. This we shall never do,
except pressing necessity demands it, and then only as a measure to
prevent bad consequences, for the time.
The colored people of to-day are not the colored people of a quarter of
a century ago, and require very different means and measures to satisfy
their wants and demands, and to effect their advancement. No wise
statesman presumes the same measures for the satisfaction of the
American people now, that may have been with propriety adopted
twenty-five years ago; neither is it wisdom to presume, that the
privileges which satisfied colored people twenty years ago, they will be
reconciled with now. That with which the father of the writer may have
been satisfied, even up to the present day, the writer cannot be content
with; the one lived in times antecedent to the birth of the other; that
which answered then, does not answer now: so is it with the whole class
of colored people in the United States. Their feelings, tastes,
predilections, wants, demands, and sympathies, are identical, and
homogeneous with those of all other Americans.
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