outhern States in '88
cast sixty-seven per cent of their total vote--the six New England
States but sixty-three per cent of theirs. By what fair rule shall the
stigma be put upon one section while the other escapes? A congressional
election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every
voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of
opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State,
in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years and the
polling places are miles apart--under the unfair reasoning of which my
section has been a constant victim--the small vote is charged to be
proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of
12,000, unless hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000;
in Iowa, in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out and
an opposition majority of 8,000 was established. The change of 40,000
votes in Iowa is accepted as political revolution--in Virginia an
increase of 30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of
political fraud.

It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the
vote is not regularly cast, but more inexplicable that this should be so
in New England than in the South. What invites the negro to the
ballot-box? He knows that of all men it has promised him most and
yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of
"forty acres and a mule;" his second, the threat that Democratic success
meant his re-enslavement. Both have been proved false in his experience.
He looked for a home, and he got the Freedman's Bank. He fought under
promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged
and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his
neighbors with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in
his--and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss
of their confidence and sympathy, that is at last his best and enduring
hope. And so, without leaders or organization--and lacking the resolute
heroism of my party friends in Vermont that make their hopeless march
over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage--he shrewdly measures the
occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches
up his mule, and jogs down the furrow, letting the mad world wag as it
will!

The negro voter can never control in the South, and it would be well if
partisans at the North would unders