gies of rapidly
increasing millions to be consigned to hopeless degradation.

Strong as we are, we need the energy that slumbers in the black man's
arm to make us stronger. We want no longer any heavy-footed, melancholy
service from the negro. We want the cheerful activity of the quickened
manhood of these sable millions. Nor can we afford to endure the
moral blight which the existence of a degraded and hated class must
necessarily inflict upon any people among whom such a class may exist.
Exclude the negroes as a class from political rights,--teach them that
the high and manly privilege of suffrage is to be enjoyed by white
citizens only,--that they may bear the burdens of the state, but that
they are to have no part in its direction or its honors,--and you at
once deprive them of one of the main incentives to manly character and
patriotic devotion to the interests of the government; in a word, you
stamp them as a degraded caste,--you teach them to despise themselves,
and all others to despise them. Men are so constituted that they largely
derive their ideas of their abilities and their possibilities from the
settled judgments of their fellow-men, and especially from such as they
read in the institutions under which they live. If these bless them,
they are blest indeed; but if these blast them, they are blasted indeed.
Give the negro the elective franchise, and you give him at once a
powerful motive for all noble exertion, and make him a man among men.
A character is demanded of him, and here as elsewhere demand favors
supply. It is nothing against this reasoning that all men who vote are
not good men or good citizens. It is enough that the possession and
exercise of the elective franchise is in itself an appeal to the nobler
elements of manhood, and imposes education as essential to the safety of
society.

To appreciate the full force of this argument, it must be observed, that
disfranchisement in a republican government based upon the idea of
human equality and universal suffrage, is a very different thing from
disfranchisement in governments based upon the idea of the divine right
of kings, or the entire subjugation of the masses. Masses of men can
take care of themselves. Besides, the disabilities imposed upon all are
necessarily without that bitter and stinging element of invidiousness
which attaches to disfranchisement in a republic. What is common to
all works no special sense of degradation to any. But in a co