ll
prove to be a mistake so much greater than the first, as to be no less
than a crime, from which not alone the Southern Negro must suffer, but
for which the nation will as surely pay the penalty as it paid for the
crime of slavery. Contempt for law is death to a republic, and this one
has developed alarming symptoms of the disease.

And now, having thus robbed the Negro of every political and civil
_right_, the white South, in palliation of its course, makes a great
show of magnanimity in leaving him, as the sole remnant of what he
acquired through the Civil War, a very inadequate public school
education, which, by the present program, is to be directed mainly
towards making him a better agricultural laborer. Even this is put
forward as a favor, although the Negro's property is taxed to pay for
it, and his labor as well. For it is a well settled principle of
political economy, that land and machinery of themselves produce
nothing, and that labor indirectly pays its fair proportion of the tax
upon the public's wealth. The white South seems to stand to the Negro at
present as one, who, having been reluctantly compelled to release
another from bondage, sees him stumbling forward and upward, neglected
by his friends and scarcely yet conscious of his own strength; seizes
him, binds him, and having bereft him of speech, of sight and of
manhood, "yokes him with the mule" and exclaims, with a show of virtue
which ought to deceive no one: "Behold how good a friend I am of yours!
Have I not left you a stomach and a pair of arms, and will I not
generously permit you to work for me with the one, that you may thereby
gain enough to fill the other? A brain you do not need. We will relieve
you of any responsibility that might seem to demand such an organ."

The argument of peace-loving Northern white men and Negro opportunists
that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by
unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real
value, and therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a
hypothetical harmony, is fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the
attitude and essentially the argument which would have surrendered to
the South in the sixties, and would have left this country to rot in
slavery for another generation. White men do not thus argue concerning
their own rights. They know too well the value of ideals. Southern white
men see too clearly the latent power of these unexercised right