W.E.B. Du Bois: “Today it wavers between the prostitute and the nun.”

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

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.

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.