ck votes. So justice and force
joined hands.

The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and
restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,
would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between
suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep
human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to
admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single
Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a
system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was
scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,
and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of
the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race
feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its
swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and
feel only indifference and contempt.

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to
government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to
the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far
better policy,--a permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system
of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a
system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such
institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of
money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective
citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most
perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its
work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all
present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and
proteges led it far afield into questionable activities, until the
South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the
good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred.
So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Am