d
this one has developed alarming symptoms of the disease.

And now, having thus robbed the Negro of every political and civil
_right_, the white South, in palliation of its course, makes a great show
of magnanimity in leaving him, as the sole remnant of what he acquired
through the Civil War, a very inadequate public school education, which,
by the present program, is to be directed mainly towards making him a
better agricultural laborer. Even this is put forward as a favor, although
the Negro's property is taxed to pay for it, and his labor as well. For it
is a well settled principle of political economy, that land and machinery
of themselves produce nothing, and that labor indirectly pays its fair
proportion of the tax upon the public's wealth. The white South seems to
stand to the Negro at present as one, who, having been reluctantly
compelled to release another from bondage, sees him stumbling forward and
upward, neglected by his friends and scarcely yet conscious of his own
strength; seizes him, binds him, and having bereft him of speech, of sight
and of manhood, "yokes him with the mule" and exclaims, with a show of
virtue which ought to deceive no one: "Behold how good a friend I am of
yours! Have I not left you a stomach and a pair of arms, and will I not
generously permit you to work for me with the one, that you may thereby
gain enough to fill the other? A brain you do not need. We will relieve
you of any responsibility that might seem to demand such an organ."

The argument of peace-loving Northern white men and Negro opportunists
that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by
unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real value,
and therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a hypothetical
harmony, is fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the attitude and
essentially the argument which would have surrendered to the South in the
sixties, and would have left this country to rot in slavery for another
generation. White men do not thus argue concerning their own rights. They
know too well the value of ideals. Southern white men see too clearly the
latent power of these unexercised rights. If the political power of the
Negro was a nullity because of his ignorance and lack of leadership, why
were they not content to leave it so, with the pleasing assurance that if
it ever became effective, it would be because the Negroes had grown fit
for its exercise? On the c