The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 180, Mar. 1882, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers chairman, and said that Columbus thought he had discovered China, and if he had really done so the question would have been, not shall the Chinese go, but shall the Anglo-Saxon come? The aboriginal right of occupation was generally conceded by the law of nations. The right of discovery covered rights as between the Christian nations, not as related to the Indians. The theory of the law was hard; its practice monstrous. Penn's treaty, never sworn to and never broken, was a notable and noble exception. Government treaties had been made with the Indian under duress, pushing him further and still further back toward the West till now the Indian, in his own continent, was a stranger in a strange land. The government had been faulty; individuals and agents criminal. The red man might be worse than the white, but was not to be judged by the same standard—especially not to be robbed of his land and his home and then punished because not up to the Christian standard of the thieves. What the Indian was now he owed to the white, and the white man owed it to him to give him all the civilization he was capable of receiving. In the year the first cargo of slaves was brought to Virginia the Pilgrims landed in the Mayflower, and for two hundred years the battle raged between these elements till slavery went down in blood. For years it was an offense against the State to teach a slave to read his Bible. Now it is an offense against Heaven not to teach the freedman to read his Bible. To-day the nation is demanding the abolition of the tribal system and asking the tenure of Indian lands in severally. Senator Rollins then referred to the Hampton School, and introduced an undergraduate of that institution, Mr. Benjamin F. Jor~es,3 who delivered an extract from the late President Garfield's inaugural, on the subject of general education. Mr. Jones is a very dark-skinned African, with all the characteristics of his race strongly marked in his face and figure. He ''spoke his piece'' with vastly superior elocution and refined intonation. Chief of the Shawnee Tribe, Thomas Wildcat, made the next address. He said: Dear friends, I am now a Hampton student, and have been steadily promoted till now I am to go forward among my people to act among them as a beacon light; to uplift them from the darkness of barbarism. The Shawnees are willing to embrace whatever may be for their advantage. They see that civilization is sweeping towards 180