st, try, and punish him commensurate with the
enormity of his crime, he straightens himself up to his full height and
defiantly says to them: "Let me alone; I will not be arrested, I will
not be tried, I'll have none of the execution of your laws, and in the
event you attempt to execute your laws upon me, I will see to it many
more men, women, or children are murdered."

Here's the plain letter of the Constitution, the plain, simple, sworn
duty of every member of Congress; yet these gentlemen from the South say
"Yes, we have violated your Constitution of the nation; we regarded it
as a local necessity; and now, if you undertake to punish us as the
Constitution prescribes, we will see to it that our former deeds of
disloyalty to that instrument, our former acts of disfranchisement and
opposition to the highest law of the land will be repeated manifoldly."

Not content with all that has been done to the black man, not because of
any deeds that he has done, Mr. Underwood advances the startling
information that these people have been thrust upon the whites of the
South, forgetting, perhaps, the horrors of the slave-trade, the
unspeakable horrors of the transit from the shores of Africa by means of
the middle passage to the American clime; the enforced bondage of the
blacks and their descendants for two and a half centuries in the United
States. Now, for the first time perhaps in the history of our lives, the
information comes that these poor, helpless, and in the main inoffensive
people were thrust upon our Southern brethren.

* * * * *

If the gentleman to whom I have referred will pardon me, I would like to
advance the statement that the musty records of 1868, filed away in the
archives of Southern capitols, as to what the Negro was thirty-two years
ago, is not a proper standard by which the Negro living on the threshold
of the twentieth century should be measured. Since that time we have
reduced the illiteracy of the race at least 45 per cent. We have written
and published near 500 books. We have nearly 300 newspapers, 3 of which
are dailies. We have now in practise over 2,000 lawyers and a
corresponding number of doctors. We have accumulated over $12,000,000
worth of school property and about $40,000,000 worth of church property.
We have about 140,000 farms and homes, valued at in the neighborhood of
$750,000,000, and personal property valued at about $170,000,000. We
have raised about $11,000,000 for educational pur