uction," also resorted to a famous provision known as "the
grandfather clause." This plan admitted to the suffrage any man who did
not have either property or educational qualifications, provided he had
voted on or before 1867 or was the son or grandson of any such person.

The devices worked effectively. Of the 147,000 negroes in Mississippi
above the age of twenty-one, only about 8600 registered under the
constitution of 1890. Louisiana had 127,000 colored voters enrolled in
1896; under the constitution drafted two years later the registration
fell to 5300. An analysis of the figures for South Carolina in 1900
indicates that only about one negro out of every hundred adult males of
that race took part in elections. Thus was closed this chapter of
reconstruction.

=The Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene.=--Numerous efforts were made to
prevail upon the Supreme Court of the United States to declare such laws
unconstitutional; but the Court, usually on technical grounds, avoided
coming to a direct decision on the merits of the matter. In one case
the Court remarked that it could not take charge of and operate the
election machinery of Alabama; it concluded that "relief from a great
political wrong, if done as alleged, by the people of a state and by the
state itself, must be given by them, or by the legislative and executive
departments of the government of the United States." Only one of the
several schemes employed, namely, the "grandfather clause," was held to
be a violation of the federal Constitution. This blow, effected in 1915
by the decision in the Oklahoma and Maryland cases, left, however, the
main structure of disfranchisement unimpaired.

=Proposals to Reduce Southern Representation in Congress.=--These
provisions excluding thousands of male citizens from the ballot did not,
in express terms, deprive any one of the vote on account of race or
color. They did not, therefore, run counter to the letter of the
fifteenth amendment; but they did unquestionably make the states which
adopted them liable to the operations of the fourteenth amendment. The
latter very explicitly provides that whenever any state deprives adult
male citizens of the right to vote (except in certain minor cases) the
representation of the state in Congress shall be reduced in the
proportion which such number of disfranchised citizens bears to the
whole number of male citizens over twenty-one years of age.

Mindful of this provision, those w