r.

It has become fashionable to question the wisdom of the Fifteenth
Amendment. I believe it to have been an act of the highest statesmanship,
based upon the fundamental idea of this Republic, entirely justified by
conditions; experimental in its nature, perhaps, as every new thing must
be, but just in principle; a choice between methods, of which it seemed
to the great statesmen of that epoch the wisest and the best, and
essentially the most just, bearing in mind the interests of the freedmen
and the Nation, as well as the feelings of the Southern whites; never
fairly tried, and therefore, not yet to be justly condemned. Not one of
those who condemn it, has been able, even in the light of subsequent
events, to suggest a better method by which the liberty and civil rights
of the freedmen and their descendants could have been protected. Its
abandonment, as I have shown, leaves this liberty and these rights frankly
without any guaranteed protection. All the education which philanthropy or
the State could offer as a _substitute_ for equality of rights, would be a
poor exchange; there is no defensible reason why they should not go hand
in hand, each encouraging and strengthening the other. The education which
one can demand as a right is likely to do more good than the education for
which one must sue as a favor.

The chief argument against Negro suffrage, the insistently proclaimed
argument, worn threadbare in Congress, on the platform, in the pulpit, in
the press, in poetry, in fiction, in impassioned rhetoric, is the
reconstruction period. And yet the evils of that period were due far more
to the venality and indifference of white men than to the incapacity of
black voters. The revised Southern Constitutions adopted under
reconstruction reveal a higher statesmanship than any which preceded or
have followed them, and prove that the freed voters could as easily have
been led into the paths of civic righteousness as into those of
misgovernment. Certain it is that under reconstruction the civil and
political rights of all men were more secure in those States than they
have ever been since. We will hear less of the evils of reconstruction,
now that the bugaboo has served its purpose by disfranchising the Negro,
it will be laid aside for a time while the nation discusses the political
corruption of great cities; the scandalous conditions in Rhode Island; the
evils attending reconstruction in the Philippines, and the scandals