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Again, there is another reason why you should hurry the settlement of this franchise system and convert the Negro vote into an intelligent one as quickly as possible. With the exigencies of national life we, of the South, will ourselves shortly need the Negro vote. I look for the South to be as anxious to have the Negro vote counted as is the North to-day. The Negro vote heretofore has been allied to a political organization the bulk of whose existence is in the North and West. He has been generally opposed to the people among whom he lives. This has arisen for several reasons, that the Southern people were the people to whom he belonged as a slave, and for the further reason that he fell into the hands, during Reconstruction days, of those who preyed upon his credulity and ignorance and made him believe that the Southern people were his enemies. These impressions are rapidly losing their force and a newer and more intelligent class of Negroes is taking the place of the old. It is to me as plain as the open day that when the Negro is impressed with the idea that the white man of the South will treat him as fairly in politics as he does in business, he will gradually and surely incline to the support of the Southern people. It is inevitable. If this is not the case it is against the experience of all of the years. The Negro is drawing his living from the South. His every relation of life is with the Southern man. His existence is tied up with the Southern States. The laws generally enacted in the South are predicated

upon the idea that the Negro will always vote against the Southern white man. This is a mistake. He will not. Nothing can be more certain than that he will ultimately become entirely affiliated with, and interested in, every policy of the Southern man. If the Negro does not become in time a good Southern man in every fibre of his being, he simply belies universal experience and breaks political precedent. When a question arises of sectional difference in the way of local policy in this country, as they are sure to arise in the Republic's life, you will need the Negro's vote and most surely you will get it. This condition is arising. It is rapidly coming. The South is no longer a great agricultural section, but it is becoming a great competitor with the North in all the commercial affairs of our national life. You will need every vote you can get to sustain your great commercial policies. The North will surely experience, as we have already experienced, the effect of the solid Negro vote. The South, most certainly, will be ultimately insistent that the Negro vote be counted. Then let the vote be an intelligent vote and let the question be settled and out of the way, and the Negro will be on the way to give us the assistance we shall certainly need.

This system will allow a different status of franchise in the different States of the Union according to the general condition of education and property-holding in each State. It will not act upon every State as an inflexible national constitutional provision. In one State,

according to the rate of illiteracy and property-holding, it will exclude a larger element of the population than in another State. In the other State, if there is a different ratio of illiteracy and property-holding, then a fair ratio of the population of that State would be touched by its provisions, thus acting fairly and equitably upon the peculiar conditions of each State.

There is another and higher aspect of this question to be considered. By the ancestral clause in many States you pull the white man down, and with an educational franchise you push the Negro to the highest educational exercise. You place a premium upon the ignorance of the white man of the South. You say to him that there must be a higher educational basis for the Negro, and yet the white man can attain the highest rights of American citizenship and at the same time wallow in ignorance. It is a wrong to the white man, which will surely bear its fruit. I have not understood in my investigation of the Anglo-Saxon that he needs to have any handicap put on any other race.

Mr. Chairman, the franchise system, as it is at present constituted in many of the States in the South, is, to say the least, practically the policy of repression. Repression has been tried at every age of the world's history and always with the same unvarying result -utter and tremendous failure. It leads nowhere. It raises no man. It demands no education. It holds ignorance as dense as ever. It drives away intelligence. It breeds discontent. It represses any rising

aspiration of the heart. It leaves the land at the end of the cycle just as it found it at the beginning. It is the policy of deadly inaction overridden by discontent. It has filled the rich empire of Russia with the nihilist and the anarchist, where your brother is a spy upon your life and the highest official of the court touches arms with the serf to plot destruction to the government. It has gangrened and filled beautiful Ireland with seething discontent. In every country the system has borne the same terrible results. In our country, where every man, white and black, feels that he has the right to equal law, under such a system the effect is increased a thousand-fold. Only the other day I stood in the little room where the mighty spirit of Stonewall Jackson wrestled in its last conflict with the Great Ruler. The scene which occurred there in the old troublous days arose to my mind. With his lifeblood ebbing, his thoughts were still on the battle-field in the conflict for his beloved country. As his immortal spirit left his body, those around him were thrilled by his last commands here on earth: "General, you must keep your men together and hold your ground!" My fellow-countrymen, under this system, can you hold the glory and the civilization of the South together? I ask you who believe in exact justice, in representative government, can you under the present system hold your ground? Would the kindly eyes under the old worn hat countenance the continuance of the system of political government where, even if it was once

necessary, that necessity in the change of affairs in this Republic has long since departed? The answer coming from every true patriot and far-seeing man of the South is, there is but one way for the South to keep our men together and hold our ground, and that is behind a fair, honest, and equitable system bearing alike upon every one.

Is not this course demanded by the plainest dictates of prudence? Does it not appeal to the most elemental principles of foresight? We have the alternative plainly presented to us. Place the franchise on a fair and wise and permanent basis or leave it in its present condition of unrest. Which is best for the South? Which plan does true patriotism prescribe? Which appeals to statesmanship and which appeals to the hour? The train of evils waiting on the present condition is too apparent for controversy. The open demand in high places for the absolute disfranchisement of the Negro, leaving ten millions of people without hope in the midst of our nation; the argument presented for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which would again rend in twain this great nation; the natural discontent resulting from the growing intelligence of the Negro; the reiterated resolutions presented to Congress unfairly representing us to the world of commerce and justice; the demand for the reduction of our representation, are all practical results of the unsettled condition of our franchise. What do we gain by delay? Nothing. We will only miss our opportunity to grasp the decisive

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