otes of its helpless beneficiaries. No
wonder that this fateful alliance of doctrinaires and partizans brought
fateful results, and that, after a generation of anarchy and race
hatred, the more fundamental task of education has only just begun.

True, there was a secondary object in view in granting the freedmen
suffrage. The thirteenth amendment, adopted in 1865, legalized and
extended the proclamation of emancipation, which had been a war measure.
But this was followed by servile and penal laws in all the Southern
states that looked like peonage in place of slavery.[12] Congress then
submitted the fourteenth amendment, which was adopted in 1867, creating
a new grade of citizenship--citizenship of the nation--and prohibiting
any state from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property
without the due process of law" and from denying to any person "the
equal protection of the laws." But this was not enough. The next step
was the fifteenth amendment adopted in 1869, prohibiting any state from
denying the suffrage to citizens of the United States "on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Thus equality before
the law was to be protected by equality in making the law. This object
was a worthy one, and it added the appearance of logical necessity to
the theories of doctrinaires and the schemes of partisans. But it failed
because based on a wrong theory of the ballot. Suffrage means
self-government. Self-government means intelligence, self-control, and
capacity for cooperation. If these are lacking, the ballot only makes
way for the "boss," the corruptionist, or the oligarchy. The suffrage
must be earned, not merely conferred, if it is to be an instrument of
self-protection.

But it is the peculiar fate of race problems that they carry contestants
to bitter extremes and afford no field for constructive compromise.
Could the nation have adopted Lincoln's project of a hundred years, or
even thirty years, of gradual emancipation, it might have avoided both
the evils of war and the fallacies of self-government. But the spirit of
race aggrandisement that precipitated the one rendered the other
inevitable. With the negro suddenly made free by conquest, each fatal
step in reconstruction was forced by the one that preceded. The North,
the South, and the negro were placed in an impossible situation, and a
nation which dreaded negro suffrage in 1868[13] adopted it in 1869.

For eight years the government