" 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 [sic] 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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