tand this. I have seen the white
people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed
sealed. But, sir, some brave men, banding them together, would rise as
Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith,
bid them look abroad to see the very air "filled with the chariots of
Israel and the horsemen thereof." If there is any human force that
cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and
responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption
cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force.
It is the inalienable right of every free community--the just and
righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on
this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or
shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility,
massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation
of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it
all the powers of earth shall not prevail. It is just as certain that
Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white
race--that before the moral and material power of her people once more
unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was
left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts--as that
night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force
bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to
federal election law; you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does
not exist, that the very form of this government may be changed; you may
invite federal interference with the New England town meeting, that has
been for a hundred years the guarantee of local government in America;
this old State--which holds in its charter the boast that it "is a free
and independent commonwealth"--may deliver its election machinery into
the hands of the government it helped to create--but never, sir, will a
single State of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to the
control of an ignorant and inferior race. We wrested our state
governments from negro supremacy when the Federal drumbeat rolled closer
to the ballot-box, and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will
ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the
cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district in the South,
we still should find in the mercy of G