al life? Never!" said the Southerner, with fiery
emphasis. "This Republic is great, not by reason of the amount of dirt we
possess, the size of our census roll, or our voting register--we are great
because of the genius of the race of pioneer white freemen who settled
this continent, dared the might of kings, and made a wilderness the home
of Freedom. Our future depends on the purity of this racial stock. The
grant of the ballot to these millions of semi-savages and the riot of
debauchery which has followed are crimes against human progress."

"Yet may we not train him?" asked Stoneman.

"To a point, yes, and then sink to his level if you walk as his equal in
physical contact with him. His race is not an infant; it is a
degenerate--older than yours in time. At last we are face to face with the
man whom slavery concealed with its rags. Suffrage is but the new paper
cloak with which the Demagogue has sought to hide the issue. Can we
assimilate the negro? The very question is pollution. In Hayti no white
man can own land. Black dukes and marquises drive over them and swear at
them for getting under their wheels. Is civilization a patent cloak with
which law-tinkers can wrap an animal and make him a king?"

"But the negro must be protected by the ballot," protested the statesman.
"The humblest man must have the opportunity to rise. The real issue is
Democracy."

"The issue, sir, is Civilization! Not whether a negro shall be protected,
but whether Society is worth saving from barbarism."

"The statesman can educate," put in the Commoner.

The doctor cleared his throat with a quick little nervous cough he was in
the habit of giving when deeply moved.

"Education, sir, is the development of that which _is_. Since the dawn of
history the negro has owned the continent of Africa--rich beyond the dream
of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet.
Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him
its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals,
yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he
never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment
of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of
stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built
a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean
strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousa