lesale disfranchisement of colored men,
upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not
measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its
entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not
always wisely--what class does?--may best be determined by considering
their condition when they are without the right to vote.

The colored people are left, in the States where they have been
disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in
any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of
government--for the feeble remnant of voters left by law is so
inconsiderable as to be without a shadow of power. Constituting one-eighth
of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern
people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because
disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to the
Congress, which, by the decision in the Alabama case, is held by the
Supreme Court to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent
to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the
same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights,
the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same
Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth
Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any
Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men
who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able to influence the
election of judges or other public officials, to whom are entrusted the
protection of their lives, their liberties and their property. No judge is
rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he may offend a black
constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the
catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext,
grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the
revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in
Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law.

Under the Southern program it is sought to exclude colored men from every
grade of the public service; not only from the higher administrative
functions, to which few of them would in any event, for a long time
aspire, but from the lowest as well. A Negro may not be a constable or a
polic