" Cast it down among
the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose
fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved
treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your
bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour
wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your
railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels
of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent
representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your
bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are
doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and
heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make
blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories.
While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past,
that you and your families will be surrounded by the most
patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the
world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past,
nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers
and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to
their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand
by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to
lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours, interlacing
our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours
in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.
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