hite race
of the South that the Negro be deprived of any privilege guaranteed
him by the Constitution of the United States. This would put upon the
South a burden under which no government could stand and prosper.
Every article in our federal Constitution was placed there with a view
of stimulating and encouraging the highest type of citizenship. To
permanently tax the Negro without giving him the right to vote as fast
as he qualifies himself in education and property for voting would
work the alienation of the affections of the Negro from the States in
which he lives, and would be the reversal of the fundamental
principles of government for which our States have stood. In other
ways than this the injury would be as great to the white man as to the
Negro. Taxation without the hope of becoming a voter would take away
from one-third the citizens of the Gulf States their interest in
government and their stimulant to become tax-payers or to secure
education, and thus be able and willing to bear their share of the
cost of education and government, which now weighs so heavily upon the
white tax-payers of the South. The more the Negro is stimulated and
encouraged, the sooner will he be able to bear a larger share of the
burdens of the South. We have recently had before us an example, in
the case of Spain, of a government that left a large portion of its
citizens in ignorance, and neglected their highest interests.

As I have said elsewhere, there is no escape through law of man or God
from the inevitable:--

"The laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with opprest;
And, close as sin and suffering joined,
We march to fate abreast."

"Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the
load upward or they will pull against you the load downward. We
shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of
the South or one-third its intelligence and progress. We shall
contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of
the South or we shall prove a veritable body of death,
stagnating, depressing, retarding, every effort to advance the
body politic."

My own feeling is that the South will gradually reach the point where
it will see the wisdom and the justice of enacting an educational or
property qualification, or both, for voting, that shall be made to
apply honestly to both races. The industrial devel