ately to the ignorant as well as
the more intelligent. For himself he was not, but among the other class.
If colored men generally were as intelligent as the gentleman who had
honored him with this interview--for he considered the speech he had
just listened to among the best he had heard on the coast--there would
be no trouble; but slavery had made that impossible. He knew that the
President--decidedly an anti-slavery man--was not in favor of bestowing
the franchise on all alike, while Charles Sumner and others favored it.

"The honorable gentleman closed his remarks by desiring the colored
people not to consider the Administration inimical to their welfare, if
in the adjustment the right of suffrage was not bestowed on all, for it
was probable that reading and writing would be the qualification
demanded. He paid a high tribute to the colored people of Washington, D.
C., for their intelligence, moral worth, and industry, and said that it
was probable that the problem of suffrage would be solved in the
District of Columbia. After a desultory conversation on phases of
national status succeeding the rebellion, both parties seeming well
pleased with the meeting, the committee retired."

I did not then, nor do I now, agree with the views of that distinguished
statesman. The benignity of the ballot lies in this: It was never
devised for the protection of the strong, but as a guardian for the
weak. It is not true that a sane man, although unlettered, has not a
proper conception of his own interests and what will conserve them--what
will protect them and give the best results for his labor. You may fool
him some of the time, as you do the most astute, but he will be oftener
found among those of whom Lincoln said "You could not fool all the
time." William Lloyd Garrison, jr., "a worthy son of a noble sire,"
pointedly says: "Whoever laments the scope of suffrage and talks of
disfranchising men on account of ignorance or poverty has as little
comprehension of the meaning of self-government as a blind man has of
the colors of the rainbow. I declare my belief that we are suffering not
from a too extended ballot, but from one too limited and
unrepresentative. We enunciate a principle of government, and then deny
its practice. If experience has established anything, it is that the
interest of one class is never safe in the hands of another. There is no
class so poor or ignorant in a Republic that it does not know its own
suffering a