nied them. In
such States, personal liberty, the right to testify in courts of law,
the right to hold, buy, and sell real estate, and, in fact, all other
rights, become mere privileges, held at the option of others. People are
no longer free when the rights of franchise have been annulled. Slavery
is truly re-enacted in those States which have succeeded in
disfranchising the Negro.

I have neither patience nor respect for those among us who are truckling
to the prejudice of our enemies by giving credence to the lie that the
ballot was placed in the black man's hand too soon. Lowell was right
when he said: "The right to vote makes a safety-valve of every voter,
and the best way to teach a man to vote is to give him a chance to
practise. It is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them
down; the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a
sense of wrong in their heads." The so-called Negro domination of the
reconstruction period has no record of misrule such as exists in most of
the Southern States to-day. It is our privilege (an oppressed people,
who know by bitter experience whereof we speak) to give this government
timely warnings as to its duties toward the inhabitants of our newly
acquired territory.

I have no confidence in the Government's ability to ameliorate the race
conflicts of the South through the course recently outlined by the
President of this nation in speeches of flattery and encomiums upon the
dead and living heroes of the Southern Confederacy. This policy of
conciliation was repeatedly attempted before the war, with the results
that the slave influence continued to spread further north and west. It
was proved then, as it ever shall be, that no nation can succeed by
making a compact with the devil. One must tremble for this country's
future when they read upon the statute-books of the Southern States
these diabolical laws against social purity, against the civil and
political rights of our citizens. It is hoped that the coming Congress
will rise to a sense of our impending danger, and see to it that the
strong arm of the Government is brought forward to protect each and
every citizen in his civil and political rights. Until this is done, we
are by no means prepared to add nine millions more of a dark race to
those with which we now have to deal. There are those already high in
the nation's council who predict that the result of our present war[27]
will be a _curse_ instead