f 17,000. A
wave of enthusiasm swept the country. His battle-cry became the
editorial of a thousand journals, and hundreds of orators found
ammunition enough in his little speech of a hundred lines to keep up a
campaign of two years' duration. It is a fact that history should not
omit to record, that from the 1st of August, 1878, until the election
of James A. Garfield to the presidency, there was no cessation to the
campaign in the North.

But the securing of a Solid North did not restore the Negro
governments at the South. The North had rallied to rebuke an insolent
South; to show the Democrats of that section that the United States
Treasury should be protected, and that the honor of the nation _would_
be maintained unsullied. If the South would not pay its honest debts
there was every reason for believing that it would not pay the
national debt. It was to be regretted that the Negro had been so
unceremoniously removed from Southern politics. But such a result was
inevitable. The Government gave him the statute-book when he ought to
have had the spelling-book; placed him in the Legislature when he
ought to have been in the school-house. In the great revolution that
followed the war, the heels were put where the brains ought to have
been. An ignorant majority, without competent leaders, could not rule
an intelligent Caucasian minority. Ignorance, vice, poverty, and
superstition could not rule intelligence, experience, wealth, and
organization. It was here that the "one could chase a thousand, and
the two could put ten thousand to flight." The Negro governments were
built on the shifting sands of the opinions of the men who
reconstructed the South, and when the storm and rains of political
contest came they fell because they were not built upon the granite
foundation of intelligence and statesmanship.

It was an immutable and inexorable law which demanded the destruction
of those governments. It was a law that knows no country, no
nationality. Spain, Mexico, France, Turkey, Russia, and Egypt have
felt its cruel touch to a greater or less degree. But a lesson was
taught the Colored people that is invaluable. Let _them_ rejoice that
they are out of politics. Let white men rule. Let them enjoy a
political life to the exclusion of business and education, and they
too will sooner or later be driven out of their places by the same law
that sent the Negro to the plantations and to the schools. And if the
Negro is industriou