, he has nothing to complain of.

The proposal to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment is utterly impracticable
and should be relegated to the limbo of forgotten issues. It is very
certain that any party founded on the proposition would utterly fail in
a national canvass. What we are considering is something practical,
something that means attainable progress. It seems to me to follow,
therefore, that there is, or ought to be, a common ground upon which we
can all stand in respect to the race question in the South, and its
political bearing, that takes away any justification for maintaining the
continued solidity of the South to prevent the so-called Negro
domination. The fear that in some way or other a social equality between
the races shall be enforced by law or brought about by political
measures really has no foundation except in the imagination of those who
fear such a result. The Federal Government has nothing to do with social
equality. The war amendments do not declare in favor of social equality.
All that the law or Constitution attempt to secure is equality of
opportunity before the law and in the pursuit of happiness, and in the
enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. Social equality is something
that grows out of voluntary concessions by the individuals forming
society.

With the elimination of the race question, can we say that there are
removed all the reasons why the people of the South are reluctant to
give up their political solidarity and divide themselves on party lines
in accordance with their economic and political views? No. There are
other reasons, perhaps only reasons of sentiment, but with the Southern
people, who are a high-strung, sensitive, and outspoken people,
considerations of sentiment are frequently quite as strong as those of
some political or economic character. In the first place it is now
nearly forty years since the South acquired its political solidarity,
and the intensity of feeling by which it was maintained, and the
ostracism and social proscription imposed on those white Southerners who
did not sympathize with the necessity for such solidarity, could not but
make lasting impression and create a permanent bias that would naturally
outlast the reason for its original existence. The trials of the
reconstruction period, the heat of the political controversies with the
Republican party, all naturally, during the forty years, implanted so
deep a feeling in the Southern Democratic breas