W.E.B. Du Bois: “About us beats the sea--the sail-flecked, restless sea, humming its tune about our flying keel, unmindful of the voices…”

Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this…

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.

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

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.