uld have no voice in directing the
government or public policy of the Southern States or of the nation.

But it is evident that where the intermingling of the races has made
such progress as it has in this country, the line which separates the
races must in many instances have been practically obliterated. And
there has arisen in the United States a very large class of the
population who are certainly not Negroes in an ethnological sense, and
whose children will be no nearer Negroes than themselves. In view,
therefore, of the very positive ground taken by the white leaders of the
South, where most of these people reside, it becomes in the highest
degree important to them to know what race they belong to. It ought to
be also a matter of serious concern to the Southern white people; for if
their zeal for good government is so great that they contemplate the
practical overthrow of the Constitution and laws of the United States to
secure it, they ought at least to be sure that no man entitled to it by
their own argument, is robbed of a right so precious as that of free
citizenship; the "all-pervading, all conquering Anglo-Saxon" ought to
set as high a value on American citizenship as the all-conquering Roman
placed upon the franchise of his State two thousand years ago. This
discussion would of course be of little interest to the genuine Negro,
who is entirely outside of the charmed circle, and must content himself
with the acquisition of wealth, the pursuit of learning and such other
privileges as his "best friends" may find it consistent with the welfare
of the nation to allow him; but to every other good citizen the inquiry
ought to be a momentous one. What is a white man?

In spite of the virulence and universality of race prejudice in the
United States, the human intellect long ago revolted at the manifest
absurdity of classifying men fifteen-sixteenths white as black men; and
hence there grew up a number of laws in different states of the Union
defining the limit which separated the white and colored races, which
was, when these laws took their rise and is now to a large extent, the
line which separated freedom and opportunity from slavery or hopeless
degradation. Some of these laws are of legislative origin; others are
judge-made laws, brought out by the exigencies of special cases which
came before the courts for determination. Some day they will, perhaps,
become mere curiosities of jurisprudence; the "black laws" w