e Union honors vice and
gives scant encouragement to noblest qualities. If a community bestow
its rewards and honors on inferior or vicious men, higher qualities
will decay and perish or seek other fields. If honors and rewards be
allotted to the noble and the good, the demand will develop
intelligence and nobility. In America there is lamentably a plentiful
lack of great men. Whatever may be the demand, the supply is
inadequate. Woe to the country, said Metternich, whose condition and
institutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs. The
country needs men of earnest convictions and noble aims, "to whom power
is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled." A
nation can have no purer wealth than the stainless honor of its public
men. The philosophic Macintosh enunciated almost a maxim when he said,
"There can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the
mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public
advantage." By some, politics seems to be regarded as a game in which
the sharpest are to win. Federal, State, or municipal government can
never be safely committed to any party or men as the result of fraud or
connivance at fraud.

Since the Federal Government dispensed with a period of probation as
preparatory to suffrage, and refused to leave the whole question of
suffrage to the States where it properly belongs, the presence of the
negroes becomes to the South fearfully ominous of peril. Giving the
right to vote to the ignorant and incapable is only a part of the evils
associated with the inhabitancy of such a multitude of citizens of a
different and inferior race. Such is the climate of the South, the
fertility of soil, the ease of bare subsistence, that little labor and
but scant clothing and shelter are needed by the negroes, with their
thriftlessness, and without taste or desire for any large measure of
artificial comforts, and with few incentives to patient industry. Their
presence will prevent any early or large immigration of Europeans. The
removal of the negroes is an obvious suggestion, but the policy pursued
toward the Indians, undesirable, as coinhabitants, but as capable as
negroes of free government, seems impracticable from want of territory
for colonization and because of the large number of the negroes. This
displacement at present may be impossible, and would certainly be
tedious and expensive. Close contact of the two races becomes a
necessit