sh vote. The color of their skin must
cease to be an index to their political creed. They must think less of
"the party" and more of themselves; give less heed to a name and more
heed to principles.

The black men and white men of the South have a common destiny.
Circumstances have brought them together and so interwoven their
interests that nothing but a miracle can dissolve the link that binds
them. It is, therefore, to their mutual disadvantage that anything but
sympathy and good will should prevail. A reign of terror means a
stagnation of all the energies of the people and a corruption of the
fountains of law and justice.

The colored men of the South must cultivate more cordial relations
with the white men of the South. They must, by a wise policy, hasten
the day when politics shall cease to be the shibboleth that creates
perpetual warfare. The citizen of a State is far more sovereign than
the citizen of the United States. The State is a real, tangible
reality; a thing of life and power; while the United States is,
purely, an abstraction--a thing that no man has successfully defined,
although many, wise in their way and in their own conceit, have
philosophized upon it to their own satisfaction. The metaphysical
polemics of men learned in the science of republican government,
covering volume upon volume of "debates," the legislation of
ignoramuses, styled statesmen, and the "strict" and "liberal"
construction placed upon their work by the judicial _magi_, together
with a long and disastrous rebellion, to the cruel arbitrament of
which the question had been, as was finally hoped, in the last resort,
submitted, have failed, all and each, to define that visionary thing
the so-called Federal government, and its just rights and powers. As
Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson left it, so it is to-day, a
bone of contention, a red flag in the hands of the political matadors
of one party to infuriate those of the other parties.

No: it is time that the colored voter learned to leave his powerless
"protectors" and take care of himself. Let every one read, listen,
think, reform his own ideas of affairs in his own locality; let him be
less interested in the continual wars of national politics than in the
interests of his own town and county and state; let him make friends
of the mammon of unrighteousness of his own neighborhood, so far as to
take an intelligent part among his neighbors, white and black, and
vote for the