the proud boast of democratic freedom and political equality is to be as mocking a lie now as it was prior to the Civil War; whether it is right that the southern states should suppress one-third of their votes and yet retain congressional representatives for the whole body of their nominal franchise. At the vision of negro supremacy, which affrights the Bourbons, the Republicans scoff, affirming that it is only the foolish and wicked policy of the Democrats that makes a race war even remotely possible. Naturally these gentlemen do not suppose their own influence in their own party to be so lamentable and perilous a thing as it seems to the enemy. They meet the accusation of "ring rule" by alleging that under normal conditions many white voters who believe in Republican principles would again ally themselves with that party, and that the party would then no longer be a black regiment with white officers.

It was obvious enough, however, that the race question had, at sundry times, bothered the white Republicans within their own ranks. In the days of their power, they reserved the best and most responsible offices for themselves, surrendering as little as possible to their eboncolored comrades. Occasionally the negroes revolted against this treatment, and said: "We vote for you white men and elect you to these desirable positions. You must give us our share of them. If we vote for you, you can vote for us." Now and then an aspiring African, relying on this demand for fair play, took from the caucus some coveted nomination, in spite of the more or less covert opposition of the whites; but the sable candidate often failed to hold the whole strength of his party at the polls. Referring to such instances of friction, a white Republican said to me: "Let the negroes vote and let their votes be honestly counted; but the negroes are not competent to fill important offices, and I will not vote to make a negro my ruler. If the political strife here should ever kindle into actual conflict between the races, I shall go, of course, with the whites, no matter what the original cause of quarrel may have been. I am a Republican, but I was a white man before I was a Republican.”

The New England Puritan, sojourning in the South, cannot feel very much at home in either of the rival camps. From

the one company he is repelled by its seemingly blind race prejudice and wilful disregard of legality; the others shock him by their illiteracy and palpable unfitness for responsibility. In a community. recognizing few of the social and political landmarks that are commonplaces of New England's political life, he goes quite adrift, and soon realizes that he must accept the services of the local pilots, wranglers though they be, and learn something from them as to how to shape his course. Neither the Democracy nor the Republicanism of the South has its exact counterpart at the North. The southern problem is unique, and stands on its own bottom of slavery.

This last fact is often mentioned in our discussions, but it is certain that its full significance is not generally understood by northern men of either party, unless they have had personal cognizance of the southern life. That personal acquaintance will show, as no amount of merely sympathetic imagination can show, how the fiery trial through which the South has passed has warped the political machinery, and how difficult it will be in one generation, perhaps in two, to make the cogs fit well again together. That personal acquaintance will show, I believe, that the Republican party has made, and makes, a mistake in demanding that the South shall at once and by act of will straighten its bent wheels, as though political machinery made of human brains and nerves could be repaired as per order at a shop, like mechanism of iron and steel. Time, or civilization working in time, the slow-moving engineer who alone can bridge over the wide discrepancy between law and practice in the Mexico south of the Rio Grande, can alone do the same work in the Mexico south of the Ohio River. It is useless to talk of legislation which would be unsupported by public opinion in large areas of territory, unless we are willing to enforce that legislation with the strong arm of power. If this were not so, what reason would there be for withholding from Utah the dignity of statehood? Can the national will hope to be more efficient in the state of Mississippi, or in any and all of the old slaves states, than it could be in a state of Utah? I do not believe it.

It is proper to say that every predisposition of the writer tells in favor of the

Republican party. On all the questions relating to and growing out of the struggle between slavery and anti-slavery, there was, and is, between the two oceans no more fervid Republican than myself. I approach the study of southern politics firm in the feeling that the force and chicanery by which the Republican party is deprived of its voice in that section ought to stop. That sentiment is as strong as ever; but I am convinced that the force and chicanery must cease, not under the compulsion of greater force, but by the removal of the incitement to use force and chicanery. I am convinced that Captain Dixon is just one-half right. It is intolerable that a few men, however sensible and patriotic, should monopolize political power by means of the support of an unwavering phalanx of intellectually inferior and, to an alarming extent, morally inferior voters. It is idle to say that the mass of the negro votes would, if they could, fall on the Republican side from any other motives than those of gratitude and of social revulsion from the dominant aristocracy. No one can assert that the majority of negroes would vote upon a reasoned and reasonable judgment that the Republican policy respecting the tariff, the currency, and civil service reform, is the wiser policy. A body of voters, nine-tenths of whom could not frame a rational sentence on any of those three topics, beyond a "Dunno, boss," should not be a welcome accession to the ranks of any party. On the other hand, every good citizen should wish to exclude from the franchise such persons, whatever their color, until they can prove themselves fit for it. Could there be a more perilous political blunder than the transformation, within a half-dozen years, of thousands of beings just released from the house of bondage into complete citizens of a republic whose future fate must depend on the intelligence of its voters? God could create a world out of nothing; but the Republican party ought not to have attempted the same feat. Intelligence is the only door by which the African can ever hope to enter permanently into the political heritage of the Englishman. If our laws have unwisely tried to open to him the shorter cut through universal manhood suffrage, it is the part of wisdom to admit the mistake and alter the laws.

Manhood suffrage is sufficiently dangerous in a homogeneous English community. In many parts of the South to-day manhood suffrage is more than a blunder or a danger, it is a crime. Let the democratic doctrinaire who disbelieves this assertion live in any part of the black South, and, if the Winnville region is a fair type, I believe that he will be as suddenly converted as Saul was on the road to Damascus.

It is very meet and right, and our bounden duty, in the orderly commonwealths of New England, to assent to the general proposition that every part of our country should enjoy a free ballot and a fair count. The percentage of illiterates here is small, yet few would be the Republicans in Massachusetts who would approve of the abolition of the educational restrictions on the suffrage. Imagine the attitude of our Republican senators, if those restrictions did not exist, and if the illiterate voters were in a majority, if they all voted with one party, and if they were all of an alien or non-English blood, say the French Canadian. Would the senators insist then and there upon the perpetuation of the triumph of illiteracy? or would they aim, if the domination of one class or the other were inevitable, to secure the triumph of the higher class and the gradual elevation of the lower one to the grade of citizenship by educational means? Any wayfarer in the latitude of Winnville may see that many whites and many more blacks have there been given a legal right to cast ballots, who are scarcely better qualified for such responsibilities than the beasts of the field. Now should we insist on having those ballots cast, or try to recommend some means of relieving the South fairly and legally from the immeasurable dangers that lurk in these ballots? The comparison often made petween the Republican championship of the negro thirty years ago and now is unfair. Slavery was a moral wrong, and deserved its violent death. The bestowal of the suffrage is not so much a question of morals as of political expediency. The infractions of the suffrage laws of the South are plainly immoral; but if the laws themselves are unwise, and therefore immoral, what can we, the kinsmen and friends of John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison, say to those who spurn such laws? The Republican party may

profitably meditate upon its legislation during the days of Reconstruction, and determine whether the wisdom of its achievement was commensurate with the excellence of its intention. We may well consider again the conditions of citizenship, with more respect for the lessons of English history, and with less respect for the vagaries of Rousseau and Jefferson. Sooner or later, we must disavow a policy and a theory which were born of shortsightedness and a revolutionary democracy, and must urge upon the South, not a veiled menace of coercion, but the policy of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the policy of disfranchising the illiterate. This will be disfranchisement without injustice.

Would the southern Democrats accept the principle of an educational qualification upon the suffrage? Not now, unless its operation affected the negroes only. Herein is exposed the weakest point in the armor of Captain Dixon and his friends. They clamor against the negro vote because it is ignorant, but most of them are less pleased to see an educated negro than an illiterate one. Their underlying purpose, whether they confess it or not, springs from a resolve that the black man shall never have political independence, not because he is unlettered, not because he is shiftless, but because of his race, because he is a "nigger." The "fire-eaters " among the southern Democrats, who were raving drunk with "nigger" before the war, have abated their violence but little. Although they are a minority, yet by superior impudence and vigor they impose their will upon their fellows. They did so in 1861; they do so now. The inroads of that transplanted northern civilization which has been called "The New South" have displaced much of this belligerent feeling already in the larger cities and in the more widely circulated newspapers; but the rancorous spirit is much more outspoken in the small local and rural journals. I frequently saw an assortment of local papers, and found the tone and flavor of them discouraging enough. One of the two leading dailies in Wilmington is a little sheet called The Messenger. It is edited by a well-preserved specimen of the gentleman of the old school, who forgives little and forgets nothing, and steeps his rhetoric in gall and wormwood. It was amusing

to follow the lavish ingenuity with which he invented from day to day new vehicles of vituperation against Speaker Reed.. He seemed to find in Mr. Reed's generous physical development the crowning enormity of a long career of political depravity, and kept up a persistent bombardment of "Fat Tom," "the fat usurper," and "the obese tyrant." I doubt not that the free and enlightened citizens who form their political opinions upon the model of The Messenger have framed a mental image of Speaker Reed that is not very dissimilar from the picture of the Aztec god of war. The portraiture displayed to them resembles in the main some huge human beast, who spits on the Constitution every morning, as a sort of grace before meat, and then insults Democratic congressmen all day for amusement. The Republican party is invariably styled the "Radical" party, and it is taken for granted that all "Radical" leaders are mercenary knaves. There are no subdued tints in the coloring. A moderate "Radical" is a rascal; an extreme "Radical" can hardly be worse.

What can an act of Congress avail against this dogmatic fury? Such a fire must be either stamped out at once or left to consume itself. It is not good to play with it. We did as much stamping as was expedient between 1861 and 1865. The heart of the nation wants no more of it. The flames are now hedged in, and damage most those who feed them. Patience and the endurance of a little discomfort from smoke and heat will be rewarded when the conflagration dies of inanition.

The Bourbon. feeling about negro citizenship, the natural outcome of the old servile relations, will begin to vanish as soon as a considerable element of the black race develops mental and moral strength enough to impress itself upon the community of whites. Wait until the numbers of the Prices and Langstons are multiplied. Here and there, I know that the Captain Dixons are ruefully awake to the demoralizing influence of their present travesty of republican institutions. Their Christian consciences, working within them, will in another generation require a fairer and juster basis for the suffrage of the South. During the next few years the South will rapidly repeat the moral history of the North during the first half of this century. It has already had its Lundy in

George Cable. It is destined to produce more fortunate Garrisons and Gerritt Smiths. The forces of freedom, though seemingly suppressed, have invincible. allies in three great democratic institutions,

the school-house, the factory, and the printing-press, and, above all, in the final operations of the sense of justice and love of fair play in the minds of our brethren. The Republican party can stand this normal amelioration by insisting upon polling the negro vote, whether by the action of an elections statute or by other means. It may be true that national elections should be under national control. I am inclined to concede that position as soon as our civil service becomes so pure, honest, and trustworthy that we need not fear to enlarge its scope. But the whole proposal need not be discussed now on any higher grounds than those of expediency. The Federal Elections Bill is a blunder, if the statement is true that in the black belt of the South a federal supervision of elections will not be peaceably received and submitted to. If my observations in North Carolina may be depended upon, that statement is indubitable. The same zeal that watched the railway stations on election day in 1888 would keep some supervisors marking time in the woods until election day had come and gone, would coerce others, and would find a way to control the returns. There would doubtless be some shooting and a more barbarous and systematic intimidation of the negroes than ever before. It is likely, indeed, that in the very worst districts the assistance of the act would never be demanded, for few residents in those localities would be audacious enough to approve a requisition for a federal supervisor. The signers of such a petition would either take the first train for parts unknown, or fill untimely graves. It is more than possible that the only places in the wide country where the Elections Act could be quietly enforced, and with permanently good results, would be in such machine-cursed northern cities as New York, Brooklyn, and Albany. There indeed the idea of the act is no innovation. By compulsion the act might be applied throughout the South; but at the cost of what contentions, political scandals, and sorrowful retrogression of the southern whites. No sane men at the North desire or expect to see a repetition

of the experiences of 1872-6. I believe that it would be well if Senator Hoar the rugged, uncompromising Puritan, the man full of convictions - could, as concerns this matter, show a trace of the practical opportunism of Quay, the man of no convictions, not even the one he has merited.

The claim that the Federal Elections Bill would secure honest and fair elections is a mistaken claim. A Winnville election, in which half a dozen bosses direct the votes of about two hundred densely ignorant individuals in a mass, is neither "honest" nor "fair," and such a spectacle can afford satisfaction only to the most hidebound partisan. The Republican party should prove to the South and to the country that it is not aiming to defend its tenure of power by an intrenchment of ignorance and unfitness. Let it declare to the South, "Yes, the illiterate negro is unfit to vote, and so is the illiterate white man. We are sorry for our mistake in subjecting you to the control of an ignorant electorate, and we are now in favor of ending the political anomalies of your situation by legally excluding from the polls all ignorant voters of all colors, upon uniform terms."

The South would laugh; but within ten years there would be more Republican congressmen from the South than we have seen since the troops were withdrawn. The educated classes of the southern whites are now as supreme in most of the southern states as the Republicans were in the days of Reconstruction. What the carpet-baggers and the Republican congressional leaders failed to do then the Democrats can do now, and they can prevent all opposition by their usual methods. If Mississippi, or any other southern state, should disfranchise in the future all those who cannot read and write, without regard to the hue of the skins, and should couple with this the establishment of the Australian ballot system, the remainder of the old slave states would gradually follow suit. The first obvious result of such changes would be uninterrupted Democratic supremacy for a season; but the freer play of the old Adam would put an end to that also. Whenever the fear of a negro majority is removed, many Farmer Tillmans will arise. It is not to be expected that the leopard will change his spots. The habit of evading and ignoring laws is too deep-seated in

the South to be eradicated in any one generation. It would be difficult for the registrars to find any white Democrats who were too ignorant to be made voters, or any black Republicans who could demonstrate their ability to read and write. Such a state of affairs would be bad enough, but vastly better than the present condition of things. The basal idea of intelligence as opposed to that of color would be continually emphasized, and alone would signify an immense advance. Slowly, perhaps unconsciously, southern public opinion would conform unreservedly to the new standards. The Bourbon faction would lose its power if its prophecies of hostile interference from the North to consolidate the negro vote should prove to be finally false. We cannot sanction the violence that our southern brethren use, but we can appreciate more fully and more kindly the terrible

burdens under which they stagger. If, instead of moving with the South, we could go back to the standpoint of 1860, and from that coigne of vantage survey the progress that the slave states should make in thirty years, we should be dazed and dizzied by the vision, and find it too good to be true. It is enough for me to know that a man who thirty years ago was the slave of Jefferson Davis is now a member of the convention which will frame a new constitution for the state of Mississippi; that a colored high school occupies the former presidential mansion of Jefferson Davis in Richmond; and that these things have been done with the consent and the aid of white men who were reared amid the influences of the slave-market. who expects more than this in one generation will expect to gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles.

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