bbotts and Parkhursts to
assure them that their unlawful course was right and justifiable, and
for the most distinguished Negro leader to declare that "every revised
Constitution throughout the Southern States has put a premium upon
intelligence, ownership of property, thrift and character." So does
every penitentiary sentence put a premium upon good conduct; but it is
poor consolation to the one unjustly condemned, to be told that he may
shorten his sentence somewhat by good behavior. Dr. Booker T.
Washington, whose language is quoted above, has, by his eminent services
in the cause of education, won deserved renown. If he has seemed, at
times, to those jealous of the best things for their race, to decry the
higher education, it can easily be borne in mind that his career is
bound up in the success of an industrial school; hence any undue stress
which he may put upon that branch of education may safely be ascribed to
the natural zeal of the promoter, without detracting in any degree from
the essential value of his teachings in favor of manual training, thrift
and character-building. But Mr. Washington's prominence as an
educational leader, among a race whose prominent leaders are so few, has
at times forced him, perhaps reluctantly, to express himself in regard
to the political condition of his people, and here his utterances have
not always been so wise nor so happy. He has declared himself in favor
of a restricted suffrage, which at present means, for his own people,
nothing less than complete loss of representation--indeed it is only in
that connection that the question has been seriously mooted; and he has
advised them to go slow in seeking to enforce their civil and political
rights, which, in effect, means silent submission to injustice. Southern
white men may applaud this advice as wise, because it fits in with their
purposes; but Senator McEnery of Louisiana, in a recent article in the
_Independent_, voices the Southern white opinion of such acquiescence
when he says: "What other race would have submitted so many years to
slavery without complaint? _What other race would have submitted so
quietly to disfranchisement?_ These facts stamp his [the Negro's]
inferiority to the white race." The time to philosophize about the good
there is in evil, is not while its correction is still possible, but, if
at all, after all hope of correction is past. Until then it calls for
nothing but rigorous condemnation. To try to read