groes
should vote with white men, he did not believe that they could even live
in the same free community. Yet since Sumner's absurd fallacy has a
certain historical importance through the influence it exerted on
Northern opinion, it may be well to point out where it lay.

The Declaration of Independence lays down three general principles
fundamental to Democracy. One is that all men are equal in respect of
their natural rights. The second is that the safeguarding of men's
natural rights is the object of government. The third that the basis of
government is contractual--its "just powers" being derived from the
consent of the governed to an implied contract.

The application of the first of these principles to the Negro is plain
enough. Whatever else he was, the Negro was a man, and, as such, had an
equal title with other men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. But neither Jefferson nor any other sane thinker ever
included the electoral suffrage among the _natural_ rights of men.
Voting is part of the machinery of government in particular States. It
is, in such communities, an acquired right depending according to the
philosophy of the Declaration of Independence on an implied contract.

Now if such a contract did really underlie American, as all human
society, nothing can be more certain than that the Negro had neither
part nor lot in it. When Douglas pretended that the black race was not
included in the expression "all men" he was talking sophistry, but when
he said that the American Republic had been made "by white men for white
men" he was stating, as Lincoln readily acknowledged, an indisputable
historical fact. The Negro was a man and had the natural rights of a
man; but he could have no claim to the special privileges of an American
citizen because he was not and never had been an American citizen. He
had not come to America as a citizen; no one would ever have dreamed of
bringing him or even admitting him if it had been supposed that he was
to be a citizen. He was brought and admitted as a slave. The fact that
the servile relationship was condemned by the democratic creed could not
make the actual relationship of the two races something wholly other
than what it plainly was. A parallel might be found in the case of a man
who, having entered into an intrigue with a woman, wholly animal and
mercenary in its character, comes under the influence of a philosophy
which condemns such a connection as sinful