, reduced to irredeemable poverty and hopeless weakness by an
upper class who would not, and a lower class who could not, improve. We
have no right to purchase dominion, no right to purchase even
abolition, at such a price as that. No _uti possidetis_ conveys any
legitimate title, except on the condition of wise administration and
mutual benefit.

But will it be enough to make the freedmen landholders merely? Must we
not make them voters also, that they may have that power of
self-protection which no interference of government can so safely,
cheaply, and surely exercise in their behalf? We answer this question
in the affirmative, for reasons both of expediency and justice. At
best, the difficulty, if not settled now, will come up again for
settlement hereafter, when it may not be so easy of solution. As a
matter of expediency, it is always wisest to shape a system of policy
with a view to permanence, much more than to immediate convenience.
When things are put upon a right footing at first,--and the only right
footing is one which will meet the inevitable demands of the future as
well as the more noisy ones of the present,--all subsidiary relations
will of necessity arrange themselves by mutual adaptation, without
constantly calling for the clumsy interference of authority. We must
leave behind us no expectation and no fear of change, to unsettle men's
minds and dishearten their industry. Both the late master and the late
slave should begin on the new order of things with a sense of its
permanence on the one hand and its rightfulness on the other. They will
soon learn that neither intelligence can do without labor, nor labor
without intelligence, and that wealth will result only from a clearly
understood and reciprocally beneficial dependence of each upon the
other. Unless we make the black a citizen, we take away from the white
the strongest inducement to educate and enlighten him. As a mere
proletary, his ignorance is a temptation to the stronger race; as a
voter, it is a danger to them which it becomes their interest to
remove. It is easy to manage the mob of New York for the time with
grape-shot, but it is the power for evil which their suffrage gives
them that will at last interest all classes, by reform and education,
to make it a power for good.

Under the head of expediency comes also this other
consideration,--that, unless made citizens, the emancipated blacks,
reckoned as they must be in the basis of represe