any good thing into
these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to accept them as an
accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one's race. Those who
commit crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing spectacle to
see the robbed applaud the robber. Silence were better.

It has become fashionable to question the wisdom of the Fifteenth
Amendment. I believe it to have been an act of the highest
statesmanship, based upon the fundamental idea of this Republic,
entirely justified by conditions; experimental in its nature, perhaps,
as every new thing must be, but just in principle; a choice between
methods, of which it seemed to the great statesmen of that epoch the
wisest and the best, and essentially the most just, bearing in mind the
interests of the freedmen and the Nation, as well as the feelings of the
Southern whites; never fairly tried, and therefore, not yet to be justly
condemned. Not one of those who condemn it, has been able, even in the
light of subsequent events, to suggest a better method by which the
liberty and civil rights of the freedmen and their descendants could
have been protected. Its abandonment, as I have shown, leaves this
liberty and these rights frankly without any guaranteed protection. All
the education which philanthropy or the State could offer as a
_substitute_ for equality of rights, would be a poor exchange; there is
no defensible reason why they should not go hand in hand, each
encouraging and strengthening the other. The education which one can
demand as a right is likely to do more good than the education for which
one must sue as a favor.

The chief argument against Negro suffrage, the insistently proclaimed
argument, worn threadbare in Congress, on the platform, in the pulpit,
in the press, in poetry, in fiction, in impassioned rhetoric, is the
reconstruction period. And yet the evils of that period were due far
more to the venality and indifference of white men than to the
incapacity of black voters. The revised Southern constitutions adopted
under reconstruction reveal a higher statesmanship than any which
preceded or have followed them, and prove that the freed voters could as
easily have been led into the paths of civic righteousness as into those
of misgovernment. Certain it is that under reconstruction the civil and
political rights of all men were more secure in those States than they
have ever been since. We will hear less of the evils of reconstruction,
now that