er this immense privilege?
Here is Mr. Owen's description of a specimen of the class of Southern
"poor whites" we propose thus to exalt.

"I have often encountered this class. I saw many of them last year,
while visiting, as member of a Government commission, some of the
Southern States. Labor degraded before their eyes has extinguished
within them all respect for industry, all ambition, all honorable
exertion to improve their condition. When last I had the pleasure of
seeing you at Nashville, I met there, in the office of a gentleman
charged with the duty of issuing transportation and rations to indigent
persons, black and white, a notable example of this strange class. He
was a Rebel deserter,--a rough, dirty, uncouth specimen of
humanity,--tall, stout, and wiry-looking, rude and abrupt in speech and
bearing, and clothed in tattered homespun. In no civil tone, he demanded
rations. When informed that all rations applicable to such a purpose
were exhausted, he broke forth,--

"What am I to do, then? How am I to get home?'

"'You can have no difficulty,' was the reply. 'It is but fifteen or
eighteen hours down the river' (the Cumberland) 'by steamboat to where
you live. I furnished you transportation; you can work your way.'

"'Work my way!' (with a scowl of angry contempt.) 'I never did a stroke
of work since I was born; and I never expect to, till my dying day.'

"The agent replied, quietly,--

"'They will give you all you want to eat on board, if you help them to
wood.'

"'Carry wood!' he retorted, with an oath. 'Whenever they ask me to carry
wood, I'll tell them they may set me on shore; I'd rather starve for a
week than work for an hour; I don't want to live in a world that I can't
make a living out of without work.'

"Is it for men like that, ignorant, illiterate, vicious, fit for no
decent employment on earth except manual labor, and spurning _all_ labor
as degradation,--is it in favor of such insolent swaggerers that we are
to disfranchise the humble, quiet, hard-working negro? Are the votes of
three such men as Stanton or Seward, Sumner or Garrison, Grant or
Sherman, to be neutralized by the ballot of one such worthless;
barbarian?"

But this great power, wielded by a population imperfectly qualified to
vote, in the name of a population which do not vote at all,--a power
equivalent to thirty members of Congress and thirty electoral
votes,--will be directed as much against Northern interests as against