public sentiment
is law. More than a third of a century has now passed, enabling a view
more dispassionate and accurate of the conditions surrounding the
freedmen directly after emancipation and the instrumentalities designed
for fitting him for citizenship.

It is not surprising, neither is he blameworthy, if in the incipiency of
joy for freedom bestowed he could not properly estimate the factors
necessary to form an homogenous citizenship. The ways for two centuries
had been divergent paths. The dominant claiming and exercising, as an
heirloom, every civil and political right; the subordinate, with
knowledge the most meager of their application or limits, by compulsion
was made to concede the claim. Neither is it singular that participation
in the exercise of these rights by the freedman should have created a
determined opposition in a majority of the former, who claimed their
fitness to rule as the embodiment of the wealth and intelligence (which
are generally the ruling factors world-wide), and would have at an early
date derived a just "power from the consent of the governed," did not
history record the unnecessary and inhuman means resorted to to extort
it, the obliquity of which can be erased only by according him the
rights of an American citizen. Mutual hostility, opposition on the one
hand to the assumption and exercise of these rights, and consequent
distrust by the freedman, often fostered by unscrupulous leaders, have
been alike detrimental to both classes, but especially so to the Negro,
for his constant need in the Southland is the cordial friendship and
helping hand of "his brother in white." He deserves it for his century
of unrequited labor in peace and in war for fidelity to the tender ties
committed to his care. Anti-revolutionist in his nature, he will
continue to merit it and possibly save the industrial life in the South
in the coming conflict of capital and labor.

That, as a class, they are in antagonism to the prevailing political
sentiment is the legitimate result of the manner of their emancipation
and a commendable gratitude and kinship for the party through which they
obtained their freedom. But Gibbon, in his "Decline and Fall of Rome,"
has said that "gratitude is expensive," and so the Negro has found it,
and is beginning to echo the sentiment and would gladly hail conditions
and opportunity where he could, after thirty-five years of blood and
fidelity, be less partisan and more fratern