n race,
we would gladly wean them, at the cost of some additional ill-will, from
the sterile path of political agitation. They can help win their rights
if they will, but not by jawing for them. One negro on a farm which he
has cleared or bought patiently hewing out a modest, toilsome
independence, is worth more to the cause of equal suffrage than three in
an Ethiopian (or any other) convention, clamoring against white
oppression with all the fire of a Spartacus. It is not logical
conviction of the justice of their claims that is needed, but a
prevalent belief that they would form a wholesome and desirable element
of the body politic. Their color exposes them to much unjust and
damaging prejudice; but if their degradation were but skin-deep, they
might easily overcome it. . . . . Of course, we understand that the evil
we contemplate is complex and retroactive--that the political degradation
of the blacks is a cause as well as a consequence of their moral
debasement. Had they never been enslaved, they would not now be so
abject in soul; had they not been so abject, they could not have been
enslaved. Our aborigines might have been crushed into slavery by
overwhelming force; but they could never have been made to live in it.
The black man who feels insulted in that he is called a 'nigger,'
therein attests the degradation of his race more forcibly than does the
blackguard at whom he takes offense; for negro is no further a term of
opprobrium than the character of the blacks has made it so. . . . . If
the blacks of to-day were all or mainly such men as Samuel R. Ward or
Frederick Douglass, nobody would consider 'negro' an invidious or
reproachful designation.

"The blacks of our State ought to enjoy the common rights of man; but
they stand greatly in need of the spirit in which those rights have been
won by other races. They will never win them as white men's barbers,
waiters, ostlers and boot blacks; that is to say, the tardy and
ungracious concession of the right of suffrage, which they may
ultimately wrench from a reluctant community, will leave them still the
political as well as social inferiors of the whites--excluded from all
honorable office, and admitted to white men's tables only as waiters and
plate-washers--unless they shall meantime have wrought out, through
toil, privation and suffering, an intellectual and essential
enfranchisement. At present, white men dread to be known as friendly to
the black, because of