ale citizens who were entitled to
vote in that year. The election returns from that state for November
1898 show that the highest total vote polled for any office was only
28,258, averaging less than eight hundred votes to each county, thus
showing that less than one eighth of the male citizens have it in their
power to control the administration and policies of the state.

If by a mere technicality one class of citizens can be deprived of the
rights and immunities guaranteed by the organic law of the nation, what
is to prevent any other class from sharing the same fate? If less than
one fourth of the male citizens of Mississippi can usurp the right to
exclusively manage the local government, what is to prevent a smaller
proportion from doing the same? If it is possible for a minority of the
people of Alabama to disfranchise one class of citizens on account of
race without the consent of the majority, what is to prevent the
disfranchisement of any other class on account of _political_ views?
Southern white men who view with apprehension these untoward political
tendencies, who are alarmed at the passing away of the last vestiges of
a republican form of government from that section of our Union, and who
silently condemn and deplore the outrageous and inexcusable manner in
which the black man is being divested of his political and civil rights
for mere party advantage, must seriously and actively face the
situation, if they would save the south from the shame and the
humiliation with which she is threatened, and which she has already too
keenly experienced at the hands of a profligate leadership.

There is a dormant statesmanship in the south that must and will exert
itself mightily, "a moral and intellectual intelligence which is not
going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by
questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal
justice and equity which it is every people's duty before God to seek."

But the question is not a sectional one. The whole American people are
deeply concerned in it. Nullification in South Carolina is as great a
national menace today as it proved to be half a century ago. Republican
institutions and the national welfare can have no guarantee or
protection against the evil consequences threatened by defiant trampling
upon constitutional authority. Not in its most palmy days did the slave
system possess such power as is aimed at by these latter day nullif