They have
rapidly acquired property. They have developed industrial skill, and
established the evidences of business facility. They have shown
themselves capable of good citizenship, both in the understanding of its
duties and the practice of them. They have vindicated the act of
emancipation and the decrees of citizenship.

Yet to-day their standing both as citizens and as Christians is opposed.
The question of their rights is discussed as if it were an open one, and
in the South it is coming to be increasingly denied. Under the plea that
it is unsafe for the black man to exercise his civil rights, there
arises a condition of affairs that can have no standing under our
government except a revolutionary standing. And the question whether the
rights of man as man shall be regarded, is to-day a more pressing
question than it has been at any previous time since the slaves were
declared to be men.

The Southern press, which both creates and voices public opinion,
reveals an attitude of mind increasingly hostile to the equal civil
rights of the black man, for the simple reason that he is not white,
which is calculated to fill the friends of American institutions with
gravest apprehensions, and which demands the serious attention of us
all. Almost every week discloses to us the fact that intimidation,
oppression and violence do override the government of the land, in its
application to the Negro people. Influential Southern journals have
pronounced the Fifteenth Amendment a living threat to the civilization
of the South, and declare that Christian statesmanship demands its
abrogation.

A thoughtful book published in New York, written in a calm and judicial
tone by an able lawyer in Virginia, in its chapter upon the future of
the Negro, says: "The social aspect of the Negro suffrage is certain to
_grow more_ threatening as the blacks increase. The motives which have
led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment
in force in the age to follow. To day the rapid increase of the black
population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our
government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European
monarchies. The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future
would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the
South, then to the prosperity of the Union." This is a temperate
expression of much Southern opinion.

Not a few hold the view that the education and adva