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This will be handed you by my son Julian, and he will explain sore in
detail the matters which I shall only touch on. The magazine has every prospect of
success; subscribers are pouring in every day, and [?] advertisers are beginning to wake up to the fact that its
circulation is very much larger than that of any six months' old periodical ever
issued in this country. This is a fact, and a very satisfying one. Six months
more will [?] place the concern on a paying
basis— a basis that will enable me to carry out certain policies that
I have in mind with respect to the negro question. These policies cannot be
successfully exploited in a daily newspaper, where they would fly in the face of
the schemes of the politicians. I am sure that I shall be able to smooth[?] over and sooth[?],
and finally dissipate all ill feelings and prejudices that now exist
between the races. At my time of life
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I have no higher ambition; in fact, it is the only ambition I have ever had, the
only line of policy that I have ever deliberately mapped out in my own mind.
Will you help me in this? There is no sort of doubt about the financial success
of the magazine if it can weather the
financial pinch that has come upon the country almost without warning; and I
[?] think its success will mean more to the
people of the whole south, white and black, then any work of purely local
philanthropy. I have it in my mind to fit the magazine to such gentle and sure policies of persuasion with [?] respect to the negro question, which is also the
white man's question, that honest people cannot resist them—and, in
the main, the people of the south are both honest and kindly. This, briefly, is
the great work that I have set before me. I do not say that I am the only man
who can carry it on, but no other man is in a better position to do it, provided
the magazine weathers the
financial crisis that seems to have struck the whole country. You see, I am not
asking any financial aid for myself. If the
magazine is doomed, I have no other things to turn to. What I am
anxious for [?] you to do is to join hands with us, so that
the policies and principles I have in mind—the
obliteration
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of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the
uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without
blushing—may be definitely carried out. Julian will tell you about the magazine, its standing and its
prospects, and if, after all, you think we have intruded on you unnecessarily, I
shall not feel hurt.
[?]
On
|the contrary, I shall beg your pardon, and call out after ⁁
you wherever you go, "God bless you!"
By the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.