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human relation it was settled. Men walked in apparent security. Yet, sir, in that greatest forum under God, the eternal, immutable, unchangeable forum of human right, it was not settled. Before its bar the decrees of the highest earthly tribunal were dissipated as the morning dew. In the splendor of its court solemn enactment of Legislature and Senate and State was devoured as by consuming flames. Under its fiery ordeal compromise of statesmen shrivelled to ashes. It was not settled right; and not until decree of court and act of law and compromise of statesmen were deluged in blood, was it settled. I speak with no unkindness but with unspeakable tenderness of the memories of other days; and not for your imperial State, with its fields. and flowing rivers and glowing furnaces, would I say aught unkind of the motives of the men who gave their sacred lives for what they believed was right. It illustrates, beyond the power of my tongue of weakness, that which I am striving to accentuate, that no question can be settled by a free people until it is settled in the forum of eternal justice. So I insist that until this question is settled right and in strict accord with the letter and spirit of the Constitution it will disturb our political relations, hold apart the North and South, hamper our development, degrade our civil liberty, pollute our franchise, endanger our freedom, and pillory us before the world as a people who do not do full and exact justice.

Sir, I beg that you will not understand for a moment

that these words are a concession that the real letter of the Constitution has been carelessly and wantonly violated by the South. I deny this charge with all my soul. I spurn with unspeakable contempt the reports of the frauds, violence, and intimidation with which the enemies of the South asperse her fair name. Her glory and her honor are to me as dear as life. Lay the book of nations wide open, and in all of the days there is none which through temptation and humiliation and sorrow has walked so steadily along the road of good government as has the South. Goaded with the bayonet, hedged about with the soldier, hounded by the alien, despoiled by the robber, her statehood decrowned and deflowered, since the morning of the world show me a country which emerged from suffering with garments as spotless and with so little of the smell of the fire about her. Yet, sir, while rejecting with disdain the calumnies against the South, still the time is upon us when we should commune with each other in a spirit of absolute fairness and most outspoken candor. It would be false to the spirit of truth pervading this Conference for me to deny that the South, appealing to a higher law than the Constitution or the statute, has never intended that the Negro should rule, or largely participate in the rule of her broad States and shape the destiny of her civilization. The time is here for plainness of speech, and he who would palter with the truth on this great question in its present portentous shape loves not his country. It is our duty to stand

before the world and not swerve from the open light of discussion. If such has not been the intention of the South, then we are asked why this State Constitution provides the rule of understanding to be interpreted by the ballot commissioner as he may wish? Why this Constitution has inserted in it the ancestral clause? Why this Constitution provides a complicated election machinery? When you answer these insistent questions, your only reply can be that the great paramount reason for such action has been to preserve the State in the rule of the intelligent. With this reply there arises before us a broken and impaired Constitution, which has unloosed from its Pandora's box the foul vultures of coming woe, which are always ready to flap their wings about the dying body of a free people. It is from this anomalous condition of political affairs that the South must be released; and every Southern man, without regard to his political future, should rise to that height of love for country, where, caring not for the clamor of the hour, despising present utilitarianism, he can contemplate a country unbroken in its love, rich in material glory and domestic peace, over whose happy, contented, and united people is the shadow of a Constitution which, under the mercy of God, needs not to be broken to serve the higher law. If there be any faint-hearted and who would shrink, I would remind him that the day is surely propitious for the coming change; that there is upon the South one of those great cycles where

"All are raised and borne

By that great current in its onward sweep,
Wandering and rippling with caressing waves
Around green islands with the breath

Of flowers that never wither."

This cycle of industrial glory and regeneration, broadening like a golden river through the South, is assisting, with resistless power, the coming change. When the South was practically stationary in its development, when the planter waited for the rain to distil its drops into the cotton and the grain to imprison the gold of the sunshine, political anomalies, comparatively speaking, were unimportant. To-day the old South is being resurrected in a new form and exceeding glory. New peoples are clasping our hands, and, as bone of our bone, we are bidding them welcome to the dear land. Millions of dollars start the music of the machine and the engine. Mills are distilling their cloudy incense over our increasing fields. New cities lift their towering walls to the glory of our prosperity. Golden genii rise from the dark mines of the earth and hold out to us their offerings of commercial greatness. Our waterfalls are enthralled to add to our fulness, and the unerring winds of modern commerce have filled our harbors with the ships of the world.

The first demand of this industrial regeneration is the absolute settlement of political complexities. Its demand is even now insistent and we cannot, if we would, longer deny its potential request. The State

which does so delay will not march abreast with its fellows in the industrial progress. This demand is as absolute and certain as any condition which ever touched a commercial and industrial existence. Then arises the crucial question, how can we remove our political complexities, give the Negro his franchise, and preserve the Constitution and at the same time not imperil our civilization? I reply that it seems to me by far the best to adopt an honest and inflexible educational and property basis administered fairly for black and white. By this method the white race controls the States he has created, and this control is based upon the eternal foundations of the law and the Constitution.

I crave your indulgence for a short time whilst I discuss this idea of an educational and property franchise, not in any detail, but in some of its higher and more general aspects. It appeals to the elements most needed in good citizenship. It will cultivate the desire for the acquisition of property and of education; and whilst attaining these two great ends of good government it will accomplish the immediate purpose for which we are striving, the settling and composing of our anomalous system of franchise. All of us hail the day of highest intelligence in those who control the government. Ignorance is the bottom of our woe. With the Negro made intelligent he is no longer dangerous to the State. He is no longer prey to the demagogue. With this system walks education with

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