On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land.
Du Bois critiques the Freedmen's Bureau for failing to foster goodwill and self-reliance among freedmen.
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But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.