neglect or injustice in the present.

The addition, too, of four millions of persons to the people of the
South, without any corresponding addition of voters, will increase the
political power of the ruling whites to an alarming extent, while it
will remove all checks on its mischievous exercise. The constitution
declares that "representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States, which may be included in this Union, according
to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the
whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a
term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all
other persons." The unanswerable argument presented at the time against
the clause relating to the slaves did not prevent its adoption. "If," it
was said, "the negroes are property, why is other property not
represented? if men, why three fifths?" Still the South has always
enjoyed the double privilege of treating the negro as an article of
merchandise and of using three fifths of him as political capital. He
has thus added to the power by which he was enslaved, and has been
represented in Congress by persons who regarded him either as a beast or
as "a descendant of Ham." In 1860, when the ratio of representation was
about one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, the South had, by the
three-fifths rule, the right to eighteen more representatives in
Congress, and eighteen more electoral votes, than it would have had, if
only free persons had been counted. The emancipation of the slaves will
give it twelve more; for the blacks will now no longer be constitutional
fractions, but constitutional units. The three-fifths arrangement was a
monstrous anomaly; but the five-fifths will be worse, if negro suffrage
be denied. Four millions of free people will, by the mere fact of being
inhabitants of Southern territory, confer a political power equal to
thirty members of Congress, and yet have no voice in their election. It
has been computed by the Hon. Robert Dale Owen, in a paper on the
subject, published in the New York "Tribune," that in some States, where
the blacks and whites are about equal in number, and where two thirds of
the whites shall "qualify" as voters, this new condition of things will
give the Southern white voter, in a Presidential or Congressional
election, three times as much political influence as a Northern voter.
And on whom shall we, in many localities, conf