IF the disfranchisement of the negro by the South could settle permanently the negro question, I think that the action of that section would find its justification in that achievement, according to the jesuitical principle that the end justifies the means. But can disfranchisement of the negro settle the negro question? First: Can it do so for the negro? Second: Can it do so for the South? Third: Can it do so for the rest of the nation? I do not think that it can do so for the negro, or for the South, or for the rest of the nation. And unless disfranchisement of the negro settles this question in its threefold aspect, it will not settle it in such a way that it will long stay settled. If the

negro refuse to abide by such a settlement, the question will not be so settled merely because the South has decided so to settle it. Neither can the South of to-day settle the question by disfranchisement, if disfranchisement of the negro be found in operation to injure the South of to-morrow much more deeply than it does the negro. For what is bad for the negro to-day will be found to be still worse for the South to-morrow. The South must, therefore, awake some time to this fact, unless she is indeed stricken with that hopeless madness by which the gods intend to destroy her. But even if the South and the negro agree so to settle the question, the question will not be per

manently settled if the North, if the rest of the nation, refuses eventually to form a party to the compact. For the rest of the nation, quite independently of the action of the South and the acquiescence of the negro, will have something, something very decisive to say ultimately about the settlement of this question. The North has, in reality, quite as much at stake in its settlement as either the negro or the South. Disfranchisement will not, therefore, prove a permanent settlement of the negro question if it be found in operation to affect injuriously Northern and national interests, or to work badly in the conduct of governmental affairs in respect to those interests.

Can disfranchisement settle the question for the negro? I do not think it can; I am sure that it will not, for the simple and sufficient reason that the negro will not consent to such a settlement; a settlement which virtually decitizenizes him, and relegates him to a condition of practical servitude in the republic. He has tasted freedom, he has tasted manhood rights, he has tasted civil and political equality. He knows that his freedom, his American citizenship, his right to vote, have been written into the Constitution of the United States, and written large there in three great amendments. He knows more: he knows that he himself has written his title to those rights with his blood in the history of the country in four wars, and he is of the firm belief that his title to them is a perfect one.

No party, no state, no section, can, therefore, deprive him of those rights without leaving in his mind a sense of bitter wrong, of being cheated of what belongs to him, cheated in defiance of law, of the supreme law of the land, and in spite of his just claim to fairer treatment at the hands of his fellow countrymen. He will understand that this enormity was committed against him on account

of his race and color. He will see that it was done by the white race, - a race that has ever wronged him, that has never failed to take from him, because it had the power, whatever he cared most for in the world. Nothing could possibly make him, under such cruel circumstances, love such a race, such an enemy. He will learn to hate the white race, therefore, with all the strength and rancor of centuries of accumulated outrages and oppressions.

The relation of the two races in the\ South could not, then, be one of mutual respect, confidence, and good will. It would become, on the contrary, one of) mutual fear, distrust, and hatred. The whites would fear, distrust, and hate the negro, and that increasingly, because they had so deeply wronged him; and the negro would return this fear, distrust, and hatred with a measure heaping up and running over, not openly, like the whites, to be sure, but covertly, cunningly, because of his weakness. He would live his life, his deeper life, more and more apart from the whites, live it in an underworld of which no white man would be able to get more than a glimpse, and that/ at rare intervals. It would be an underworld in which his bitter sense of wrong, his brooding miseries, his repressed facul-\ ties of mind, his crushed sensibilities, his imprisoned aspirations to be and to do as other men,

his elemental powers of resistance, his primitive passions, his savage instincts, his very despair, would burn and rage beneath the thin crust of law and order which separates him from the upper world of the white race, his implacable foe and oppressor. Through this thin crust of law and order there will perforce break at times some of that hidden fire, ́ some of that boiling lava of a race's agony and despair. There will be race feuds, race conflicts, as certainly as winds/ will blow, but no one will be deeply enough versed in the movements of these stormy, these fiery currents and visitations from the abysses of that underworld of the negro, to be able to discover

their formation, to foretell their coming, or to forecast their extent and duration.

So far as the negro is concerned, then, to disfranchise him will not settle the negro question. It will do anything else better than that. For it will make trouble, and no end of it. It will certainly make trouble if he rise in the human scale in spite of the wrong done him. Does any one think that he will ever cease to strive for the restoration of his rights as an American citizen, and all of his rights, if he rise in character, property, and intelli\gence? To think the contrary is to think an absurdity. But if he fall in the human scale in consequence of the wrong done him, he will surely drag the South down with him. For he and the South are bound the one to the other by a ligament as vital as that which bound together for good or bad, for life or death, the Siamese twins. The Enceladian struggles of the black Titan of the South beneath the huge mass of the white race's brutal oppressions, and of his own imbruted nature, will shake peace out of the land and prosperity out of the Southern states, land involve, finally, whites and blacks alike in common poverty, degradation, and failure in the economic world, in hopeless decline of all of the great social forces which make a people move upward and not downward, forward and not backward in civilization.

II

/ Disfranchisement of the negro is bad for the South. It is bad for her, in the first place, on account of the harmful effect produced by it on her black labor. It makes a large proportion of her laboring population restless and discontented with their civil and social condition, and it will keep them so. It makes it well-nigh impossible for this restless and discontented labor class to make the most and the best of themselves with the limited opportunities afforded them, with the social and political restrictions imposed by law upon \them. It hinders employers of this labor

from producing the largest and the best results with it, for the same cause. For to obtain by means of this labor the largest and best results, employers of it ought to do the things, ought to seek to have the state do the things, which will tend to reduce the natural friction between labor and capital to its lowest terms, to make labor contented and happy, surely not the things which will have the opposite effect on that labor. Otherwise, the energy which ought to go into production will be scattered, consumed, in contests with capital, in active or passive resistance to bad social, and economic conditions, in effective or ineffective striving to improve those conditions.

Every labor class has but a given amount of energy, I take it, to devote to production. How much of this energy may be available for productive purposes depends on its social condition, whether it is contented or discontented, getting on in the world, getting ahead in material well-being and well-doing; on its economic condition, whether it is intelligent or ignorant, efficient or inefficient; on its civil condition, its legal status, whether it enjoys equal laws and equal opportunities with other labor classes in the struggle for existence, in the battle for bread, or whether it is crippled, obstructed instead, by unequal laws, by artificial restrictions which are made to apply to its activity alone.

The grand source of wealth of any community is its labor. The warfare which nation wages against nation to-day is not military, but industrial. Competition among nations for markets for the sale of their surplus products is at bottom a struggle of the labor of different nations for industrial possession of those markets, for the industrial supremacy of the labor of one country over the labor of other countries. Industrialism, commercialism, not militarism, mark the character of our twentieth-century civilization. That country, therefore, which takes into this industrial rivalry and struggle the best trained, the most completely equipped,

the most up-to-date labor, will win over those other countries which bring to the battle for world markets a body of crude, backward, and inefficient labor. Education, skill, quality, tell in production; tell at once, and tell in the long run. It is now well understood that the most intelligent labor is the most profitable labor. Ignorant labor is certainly no match) lin world markets for intelligent labor. It is no match in home markets either. Quality, intelligence, will prevail in such an industrial contest, whether in agriculture, manufactures, mining, or commerce.

But to get the best and the most out of labor, it must not only be intelligent, it must also be free,-free to rise or sink in the social scale. It must have a voice in making the laws under which it lives. Otherwise those laws will operate to hinder, not to help it to make the best fight of which it is capable for possession of home and foreign markets. Without this voice the laws will become more and more unequal and oppressive. A labor class) deprived of freedom, of a voice in government, cannot maintain the advantage which mere intelligence and skill may have gained for it in the struggle for ex-/ istence. As it loses freedom, a voice in government, it will lose ultimately its skill, its intelligence as an industrial factor./ For it will become, in effect, subject to, if not exactly the slave of, the capitalistic and labor classes which are free, which make the laws. And these classes will invariably act on the assumption that the more ignorant such a subject labor class is, the less trouble it will cause. In their opinion slave labor is more manageable than free labor, gives rise to simpler social conditions, to problems less complex and difficult to handle.

Instead of establishing schools for the education of a labor class deprived of the right to vote, the class which possesses the right will not establish new ones, and will, in addition, endeavor to lower the standard of those already established and then to do away with them entirely. The chief end and purpose of the classes with

the right to vote will be, not to raise the average of literacy, of intelligence of the class without that right, but to lower the same in order the better to keep it in a state of permanent industrial subordination and inferiority to themselves. And so the negro labor of the South, deprived of the right to vote, will see its schools diminish in numbers and quality, will get, in one state and then in another, fewer schools and shorter terms, until they reach the vanishing point, where in large portions of the South negro schools/ will disappear altogether. Under such circumstances negro labor instead of advancing in intelligence and skill, in economic efficiency, will steadily lose the ground gained by it in these respects since the war, and will retrograde to the condition of dense ignorance, of economic inefficiency, which characterized it before that event. Surely slave labor is the most unproductive, the most wasteful labor in the world. As it was not able to compete successfully with the free and intelligent labor of the North before the war, it will not be able to do so to-day or to-morrow. Ignorant negro labor must weight the South down heavily, therefore, in that industrial struggle in which it is now engaged, not alone with the rest of the nation, but with the world. And this means for Southern labor industrial inferiority to the labor of the rest of the nation and of the world. It means for the Southern states ultimate industrial feebleness and subordination to the rest of the nation, and a low order of civilization.

K

Thus it will be found that disfranchisement, which was intended to make the negro a serf, to degrade him as a man, to extinguish his ambition, to extinguish his intelligence, to fix for him in the state, in society, a place of permanent inferiority and subordination to the white race, has degraded the whole South industrially at the same time, and fixed for her likewise a place of permanent economic inferiority and subordination to the, rest of the nation. The huge body of her