He is not prevented by law from learning to
read the Bible. These things are not failures. He can own
land. He has schools and colleges. The young colored man
is received as an equal into nearly every Northern college
and university. He has frequently taken the highest university
honors. I suppose he does not know, from the behavior of
his companions, that they think of the difference between
the color of his skin and theirs. His right to vote is secure
in thirty-four of the forty-five States of the Union. So
far, there has been no failure. When the Civil War broke
out, there were fifteen slave States and sixteen free States.
In Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia the negro seems to
have his place now like other citizens. The same thing probably
is true in St. Louis, and likely to be true before long throughout
Missouri. There are thirty States out of forty-five, and
there will before long probably be thirty-five out of fifty
in which the old race feeling, growing out of slavery has
never got a hold. The old race-hatred of the negro is getting
into a corner. So far reconstruction has not been a failure.

Two things are not yet accomplished. There are eleven States
in which the negro is not yet secure in his political rights;
and there are as many, and perhaps two or three more, in which
if he be suspected of a crime of the first magnitude, he is
likely to undergo a cruel death, without a trial. That would
have been quite as likely, indeed a good deal more likely
to have happened, if the reconstruction measures had never
been enacted.

It is a bad thing that any man who has the Constitutional
right to vote should fail to have his vote received and counted.
But I think it is a fair question whether the existence of
this condition throughout so large a country, with the prospect
that slowly and gradually as the negro improves he will get
his rights, be not better than the alternative which must
have been his reduction to slavery again, or what is nearly
as bad, a race of peons in this country. That is the question
into the answer of which so much prejudice enters that it
is hardly worth while to reason about it. My opinion is that
as the colored man gets land, becomes chaste, frugal, temperate,
industrious, veracious, that he will gradually acquire respect,
and will attain political equality. Let us not be in a hurry.
Evils, if they be evils, which have existed from the foundation
of the world,