doubt truly enough, that a large part of the negroes are
indifferent to the suffrage, and do not care to vote. But is this a
desirable state of things? Taking the class to whom the law awards the
suffrage,--the men of some modest property qualification and
intelligence,--is it well for the community that they should be
indifferent to questions of taxation, of law-making, of courts and
schools and roads and bridges? Is it not in every sense desirable that
they should be encouraged to take an intelligent and active interest in
such matters? John Graham Brooks tells of his recent observations in
Gloucester county, Virginia, where whites and blacks have been
co-operating for good local government, and the curse of liquor-selling
has been restrained by the votes of a black majority. Surely we should
all like to see that precedent widely followed. That is a very crude
idea of politics which sees in it only a scramble for public offices.
That is an obsolete idea which construes Southern politics as a struggle
for power between whites and blacks. Politics, in a large sense, is the
common housekeeping of the community. It is the administration of the
broadest and highest common interests. The importance to the Southern
negro of the political function was greatly overrated when he emerged
from chattelhood. But is there any wiser course now than to educate and
train and encourage him to a living membership in the body politic?

In this connection we naturally recur to the relation of the national
government to the negro problem. In general, the let-alone policy of the
last twenty-eight years is likely to continue, and there is every reason
why it should. The termination of Federal interference in 1877 was not
due to criminal indifference or lassitude on the part of the North, or
to political accident. It was essentially the gravitation of the nation
to its normal position, after the shock of war and the adjustment of the
vital changes involved in the abolition of slavery. Those changes
recognized in the national Constitution, and the new order set on its
feet, it was natural, inevitable, and right, that the States should
resume the control of their local affairs. The division of governmental
functions between State and nation was one of the most fortunate
circumstances of our birth-period; it was the ripening of our historical
antecedents, felicitously grasped and molded by a group of great men. It
rests on the fitness of each loca