ntation, and yet
without power to modify the character of the representatives chosen,
will throw so much more power into the hands of men certain to turn it
to their disadvantage, and only too probably to our own. This mass, if
we leave it inert, may, in any near balance of parties, be enough to
crush us; while, if we endow it with life and volition, if we put it in
the way of rising in intelligence and profiting by self-exertion, it
will be the best garrison for maintaining the supremacy of our ideas,
till they have had time to justify themselves by experience. Have we
endured and prosecuted this war for the sake of bringing back our old
enemies to legislate for us, stronger than ever, with all the
resentment and none of the instruction of defeat?

But as a measure of justice also, which is always the highest
expediency, we are in favor of giving the ballot to the freedmen. Our
answer to the question, What are we to do with the negro? is short and
simple. Give him a fair chance. We must get rid of the delusion that
right is in any way dependent on the skin, and not on an inward virtue.
Our war has been carried on for the principles of democracy, and a
cardinal point of those principles is, that the only way in which to
fit men for freedom is to make them free, the only way to teach them
how to use political power is to give it them. Both South and North
have at last conceded the manhood of the negro, and the question now is
how we shall make that manhood available and profitable to him and to
us. Democracy does not mean, to any intelligent person, an attempt at
the impossibility of making one man as good as another. But it
certainly does mean the making of one man's manhood as good as
another's and the giving to every human being the right of unlimited
free trade in all his faculties and acquirements. We believe the white
race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain
sufficient ascendency to prevent any serious mischief from the new
order of things. We admit that the whole subject bristles with
difficulties, and we would by no means discuss or decide it on
sentimental grounds. But our choice would seem to be between
unqualified citizenship, to depend on the ability to read and write, if
you will, and setting the blacks apart in some territory by themselves.
There are, we think, insuperable objections to this last plan. It would
put them beyond the reach of all good influence from the higher
civi