negro interests. Added to the power which the South will derive from its
voting population, it will enable that section to control one third of
all the votes in the House of Representatives; and, says Professor
Parsons, "if they stand together, and vote as a unit, they will need
only about one sixth more to get and hold control of our national
legislation and all our foreign and domestic policy." Our political
experience has unfortunately not been such as to justify us in believing
it to be impossible for any party, under a resolute Southern lead, to
obtain one sixth of the Northern strength in Congress. What would be the
result of such a combination? Why, the National government would be
substantially in the hands of those who have been engaged in a desperate
struggle to overthrow it; and it would be a government converted into a
great military and naval power by the war which resulted in their
defeat, and fully competent to enforce its decisions at home and abroad
by the strong hand. Nothing is purchased at such a frightful price as
the indulgence of a prejudice; the cry against "nigger equality" is a
prejudice of the most mischievous kind; and it may be we shall hereafter
find cause to deplore, that, when we had to choose between "nigger
equality" and Southern predominance, our choice was to keep the "nigger"
down, even if we failed to keep ourselves up.

One result of Southern predominance everybody can appreciate. The
national debt is so interwoven with every form of the business and
industry of the loyal States that its repudiation would be the most
appalling of evils. A tax to pay it at once would not produce half the
financial derangement and moral disorder which repudiation would cause;
for repudiation, as Mirabeau well observed, is nothing but taxation in
its most cruel, unequal, iniquitous, and calamitous form. But what
reason have we to think that a reconstructed South, dominant in the
Federal government, would regard the debt with feelings similar to ours?
The negroes would associate it with their freedom, of which it was the
price; their late masters would view it as the symbol of their
humiliation, which it was incurred to effect. We must remember that the
South loses the whole cost of Rebellion, and is at the same time
required to pay its share of the cost of suppressing Rebellion. The cost
of Rebellion is, in addition to the devastation of property caused by
invasion, the whole Southern debt of some tw