W.E.B. Du Bois: “I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.”

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.

Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.

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