W.E.B. Du Bois: “A vision of life came to the growing boy,—mystic, wonderful.”

Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.

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

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.