the
wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals
that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics
consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on
having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly
with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite. In this
state of mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro
vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave
politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the
North who neglected their own civic duties grew hilarious over the
exaggerated importance with which the Negro regarded the franchise.
Thus it easily happened that more and more the better class of Negroes
followed the advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no
further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of
their race the exercise of their rights as voters. The black vote that
still remained was not trained and educated, but further debauched by
open and unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter
was thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of
private gain by disreputable means.

And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the
perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the
purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the
raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic
citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children's
children,--in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic
virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are
we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless
form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up
their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not
saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of
ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the
present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a
purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case
that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the
black man from politics.

Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question
of the industrial and intellectual development of the N