opment of the Negro race along restricted lines, must,
because of the danger that lurks in the principle of
repression, be rejected as totally inadequate. Above all
things, the government must go out of the business of
repression, must cease tagging the Negro as an outcast among
his fellows. The men who administer affairs must be made
amenable to the sentiment of the whole body politic and not
simply that portion represented by the white citizenship.

"One says: 'The nation felt all this and granted to the Negroes
political power.' Explain to us those largely writ words
'Reconstruction Governments.'

"Right gladly do we respond to the task assigned.

"One whom the nation knows as perhaps the foremost living
Southerner, who has acquired the art of speaking upon this
whole matter in a way that seems to beget at least a respectful
hearing everywhere, says: 'Few reasonable men now charge the
Negroes at large with more than ignorance and an invincible
faculty for being worked on.'

"To this we make reply, the overturning of slavery in the South
was revolutionary and not evolutionary. There was no spiritual
cataclysm to correspond with the political one. He who on one
day ruled _over_ the Negro was found spiritually unprepared to
rule _with_ him on the succeeding day.

"When, therefore, the Negroes were approached by two
sets of men, the one set, composed of the former ruling class
of the South, equipped morally and intellectually for good
government, but wrong at heart upon the great question of human
rights, the other composed largely of carpet baggers, scalawags
and bad administrators, but true to the principle of equality
before the law, it ought not to be surprising that a race fresh
from the galling yoke of slavery should choose the set that
would look after their liberties.

"This, we feel, fully explains the ills of reconstruction, and
those that lament that they were thrust aside from leadership,
should further lament that they were evidently not far enough
away from the ruling of a race by a race to have charge of the
momentous experiment of the joint rulership of races. The real
blame for the unfortunate state of affairs falls, perhaps, upon
those crushers of free speech in the South who, prior to the
Civil War, all