fact, that a large
body of men, held before the war as slaves, have been emancipated, and
added to the body of the people. They are now as free as the white men.
The old constitutions of the Slave States could have no application to
the new condition of affairs. The change in the circumstances, by which
four years have done the ordinary work of a century, demands a
corresponding change in the application of old rules, even admitting
that we should take them as a guide. Having converted the loyal blacks
from slaves into the condition of citizens of the United States, there
can be no reason or justice or policy in allowing them to be made, in
localities recently Rebel, the subjects of whites who have but just
purged themselves from the guilt of treason.

The question of negro suffrage being thus reduced to a question of
expediency, to be decided on its own merits, the first argument brought
against it is based on the proposition, that it is inexpedient to give
the privilege of voting to the ignorant and unintelligent. This sounds
well; but a moment's reflection shows us that the objection is directed
simply against deficiencies of education and intelligence which happen
to be accompanied with a black skin. Three fifths or three fourths of
the poor whites of the South cannot read or write; and they are cruelly
belied, if they do not add to their ignorance that more important
disqualification for good citizenship,--indisposition or incapacity for
work. In general, the American system proceeds on the idea that the best
way of qualifying men to vote is voting, as the best way of teaching
boys to swim is to let them go into the water. "Our national
experience," says Chief-Justice Chase, in a letter to the New Orleans
freedmen, "has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on
the broad base of Universal Suffrage. It has proved, also, that
universal suffrage is the surest guaranty and most powerful stimulus of
individual, social, and political progress." But even if we take the
ground, that education and suffrage, though not actually, should
properly be, identical, the argument would not apply to the case of the
freedmen. What we need primarily at the South is loyal citizens of the
United States, and treason there is in inverse proportion to ignorance.
If, in reconstructing the Rebel communities, we make suffrage depend on
education, we inevitably put the local governments into the hands of a
small minority of promi