lored members--all from the sugar districts; in the Senate
there are four colored members--all from the sugar districts. This
condition of things is readily accounted for by the fact that the
colored people in the sugar districts are more generally tax payers
than they are in the cotton districts, and, having mutual interests,
both white and black are more tolerant and better informed. The
Bulldozer and White Liner can find but little room to ply their
nefarious work where everybody finds plenty of work that pays well,
and where material prosperity is the first and political bickering the
secondary consideration. Because of the mutual interests at stake,
colored men in the sugar districts are often protected by their
bitterest political opponents.

"The State of Louisiana is assessed at $200,000,000, of which her
colored population pay taxes upon more than $30,000,000.--Two thirds
of this is owned by colored men in the sugar districts."

I could multiply quotations, but they would serve only to confirm my
view, that the colored man merely requires time to fully comprehend
his freedom and his opportunities, to enjoy the ample immunities of
the first and to improve to the utmost the advantages of the second.
All over the country the colored man is coming to understand that if
he is ever to have and enjoy a status in this country at all
commensurate with that of his white fellow-citizens, he must get his
grip upon the elements of success which they employ with such effect,
and boldly enter the lists, a competitor who must make a way for
himself. Dr. Marshall says truly: "The Negro is neither a beggar, nor
a pauper, nor a tramp." He is, essentially, a man of the largest
wealth, God having given him, under tropical conditions, a powerful
physique, with ample muscle and constitution to extract out of the
repositories of nature her buried wealth. He only needs intelligence
to use the wealth he creates. When he has intelligence, he will no
longer labor to enrich men more designing and unscrupulous than he is;
he will labor to enrich himself and his children. Indeed, in his
powerful muscle and enduring physical constitution, directed by
intelligence, the black man of the South, who alone has demonstrated
his capacity to labor with success in the rice swamps, the cotton, and
the cornfields of the South, will ultimately turn the tables upon the
unscrupulous harpies who have robbed him for more than two hundred
years; and from ha