it foreshadows the attitude which the Court will take upon
other cases to the same general end which will soon come before it, is
scarcely less than a reaffirmation of the Dred Scott decision; it
certainly amounts to this--that in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment,
colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States
are bound to respect. To say this much is to say that all the privileges
and immunities which Negroes henceforth enjoy, must be by favor of the
whites; they are not _rights_. The whites have so declared; they proclaim
that the country is theirs, that the Negro should be thankful that he has
so much, when so much more might be withheld from him. He stands upon a
lower footing than any alien; he has no government to which he may look
for protection.

Moreover, the white South sends to Congress, on a basis including the
Negro population, a delegation nearly twice as large as it is justly
entitled to, and one which may always safely be relied upon to oppose in
Congress every measure which seeks to protect the equality, or to enlarge
the rights of colored citizens. The grossness of this injustice is all the
more apparent since the Supreme Court, in the Alabama case referred to,
has declared the legislative and political department of the government to
be the only power which can right a political wrong. Under this decision
still further attacks upon the liberties of the citizen may be confidently
expected. Armed with the Negro's sole weapon of defense, the white South
stands ready to smite down his rights. The ballot was first given to the
Negro to defend him against this very thing. He needs it now far more than
then, and for even stronger reasons. The 9,000,000 free colored people of
to-day have vastly more to defend than the 3,000,000 hapless blacks who
had just emerged from slavery. If there be those who maintain that it was
a mistake to give the Negro the ballot at the time and in the manner in
which it was given, let them take to heart this reflection: that to
deprive him of it to-day, or to so restrict it as to leave him utterly
defenseless against the present relentless attitude of the South toward
his rights, will prove to be a mistake so much greater than the first, as
to be no less than a crime, from which not alone the Southern Negro must
suffer, but for which the nation will as surely pay the penalty as it paid
for the crime of slavery. Contempt for law is death to a republic, an