One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell.

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.

If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

Men must not only know, they must act.

The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.