W.E.B. Du Bois: “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught…”

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.

Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin…

But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.

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.