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III.

But we have next the assertion that they
would become so if the hand of suppression
were withdrawn. This is a very ancient argument.
A century ago it was believed and practically
applied against millions of white men, just
as it is now urged against millions of Negroes,
and was based on the same specious assumption,
that the ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed
man is virtually in all cases dangerous to society
and government, and most dangerous when invested
with civil and political liberty. Nor was
its repudiation any rash leap taken initially by
our own country in the heat of revolution.
Manhood suffrage, even for white citizens of the
United States, is barely seventy-five years old,
and of all the earlier States of the Union, is
youngest in New England. To-day, except only
Russia and one or two others less notable, every
white man's government in the world has either
reached or is steadily moving toward manhood
suffrage. The republics of South and Central
America, some of which are not purely white
men's governments at all, are well along on the
same road, and wherever they have also shaken
off the slavery of slaveholding and the fetters of
ecclesiastical tyranny, are rising into commercial

and political greatness. Yet we must still
meet the same argument, long overturned as to
white men, but readapted and made special
against Negroes as so far exceeding white
men in cupidity, vanity and passion, that what
political experiment may have proved even as to
ignorant, unintelligent and unmoneyed white
men, is not thereby made even supposably possible
as to Negroes.

The loose assertions offered to support this
assumption we deny. We deny that this utter
and manifest unfitness of the Negro is believed
by all respectable Southern white men. All
through the South there are worthy white men
who deny that the experiment need be futile
or disastrous. We deny that Southern white
men by virtue of close daily contact with the
Negro in multitude are so exclusively able to
decide this point, that their word ought to be
final. Some men may be too far off, but just as
certainly others may be too near, to decide it
uncounselled; and in fact every great step thus
far taken towards the Negro's real betterment
has been first proposed by those remote from
him while it has been condemned as idle or
dangerous by those nearest him. We deny that
the experiment of full civil and political liberty
has ever been fairly tried on the Negroes of the

South. One thing has always been lacking, the
want of which has made the experiment a false
and unfair trial. It always lacked the consent—
it had the constant vehement opposition—of
almost the whole upper class of society in the
commonwealth where the freedman's new and
untried citizenship rested. Without land-ownership,
commerce, credit, learning, political or
financial experience, the world's acquaintance
and esteem, the habit of organization, or any
other element of political power except the naked
ballot and the ability to appeal at last resort to
the Federal authority, and with almost the
whole upper class of society, and well nigh all
these elements of power skillfully arrayed against
them, the Negroes, accepting the party leadership
and fellowship of any and every sort of
white man who would only recognize their new
tenure of rights, took up the task, abandoned to
them in confident derision by their former masters,
of establishing equal free government for all,
in the States whose governments had never before
been free to other than white men. The
resulting governments were lamentably corrupt.
But it was the day of Tweed, rings and Credit
Mobiliers, great and small, the climacteric hour
of official corruption throughout a whole nation
hitherto absorbed in the rougher work of establishing
a complete freedom. Even so they began
to rise on broader, truer foundations of political
liberty and equity than had ever been laid in
those States before: and certainly no people, even
when not antagonized by the great bulk of a
powerful class above them, ever set up both free
and pure government in the first twelve years of
their bodily emancipation or the first nine years
of their enfranchisement. Another twelve years
has passed, with the Negroes' political power
nullified, and the white, intelligent, wealth holding
class in uninterrupted control; and still that
class is longing and groping in vain for pure
government, and is confessedly farther from it at
the end of its twelfth year of recovered control
than it was at the end of its first, while the principles
of free government are crowded back to
where they were twenty years ago. No, it is
not the admission of, it is the refusal to admit,
the Negro into political co-partnership—not
monopoly—on the basis of a union of free and
pure governments, that has produced the very
conditions which it was argued such admission
would precipitate.

It was this refusal that threw him, intoxicated
with more importance and power than either
friend or foe intended him to have, into the arms
of political hypocrites and thieves. It is this

refusal that has demolished with ghastly clearness
the truth, counted suicidal to confess, that
even the present ruling class is not strong enough
or pure enough to establish and maintain pure
government without the aid and consent of the
governed. I admit the Negro problem is not always
and only political. No problem can be.
It is not in the nature of politics for any question
to be only political. The Negro question is
fundamentally a question of civil rights, including
political rights as the fortress of all the others.
It is not always a peculiarly African proneness to
anarchy; nor is it always race instinct; it is
often only the traditional pride of a master-class,
that remands the Negro to a separate and invidious
tenure of his civil rights; but it is to
perpetuate this alienism that he is excluded from
the political co-partnership; and it is the struggle
to maintain this exclusion that keeps the colored
vote solid, prevents its white antagonists from
dividing where they differ as to other measures,
and holds them under a fatal One-Party idea
that rules them with a rod of iron.

We see then how far the facts of history and
present conditions are from proving the Southern
States an exception to the rule that pure
government cannot be got by setting its claims
before and above free government. Rather, they

present these States as striking examples of free
government itself falling into decay through the
well-meant but fatal policy of seeking its purification
by constricting the rights and liberties of
the weaker and inferior ranks of society.