Until the very last she was on the roll of the active missionaries of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society. In the fall of 1915 she decided that she must once more see the schools in the South that meant so much to her. In December she came again to her beloved Spelman. While in Atlanta she met with an accident that still further weakened her. After a few weeks, however, she went on to Jacksonville, and then to Selma. There she passed.
"When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.... Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
It is the purpose of the present chapter to reply to some of the more common of the arguments brought forward against the Negro. We shall by no means attempt to cover the whole ground, or even pretend that in every case we have summoned the most representative critics. At the same time we feel that those that are adduced are fairly typical of those of harsher view.
One of the noteworthy characteristics of discussion in recent years has been a tendency to deny the ideals on which America was founded, especially where the Negro was concerned. One of the frankest statements along this line was a Fourth of July address in 1911 by no less a person than Ex-President Eliot of Harvard University. This distinguished citizen gave voice to an opinion which is just now gaining more and more converts in this country, in effect this: The Declaration of Independence is a wornout document; it never was meant to be taken seriously; and, in the words of Rufus Choate, it is made up simply of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural right." The passage to which exception seems especially to be taken is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It will be observed that in a way each successive one of the three clauses here explains the one preceding; that is to say, all men are equal in the rights given to them by God, and these rights consist in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fathers were not thinking about such things as that one child was born in a palace and another in a hut, or that one was born with brilliant intellect and the other with little power of mind. Certainly the "facts submitted to a candid world" are based on no such principles as these. The founders were talking about things moral. Each man deserved at least that no other man should have power to declare that he _must_ live in a hut. In other words, each man deserved a man's chance in the world.