, the South Carolina convention of 1895.
These facts illustrate the tendency of the South, especially the Gulf
States, to move in unison in all legislation affecting their colored
citizens.

The object of these conventions has been the disfranchisement of the
colored people, so far as it could be done consistently with the 15th
amendment, and, at the same time preserve the right as far as possible
to white men.

In some parts of the country, many intelligent men who have lived only
in an atmosphere of liberty and its unbroken traditions, have believed
that the suffrage movement in the South was solely in the interest of
clean politics and an intelligent electorate, but if the record just
made by the Louisiana constitutional architects does not convince them
that they have been mistaken, then they would not change their
opinion though one should rise from the dead.

There is an important bit of history back of the present result. Two
years ago the legislature submitted to the people an amendment
limiting the right of the ballot by an educational and property test.
That proposition was buried beneath a mountain of votes. This,
perhaps, was not a fair test of the public sentiment in the question
presented, for the reason that the amendment contained a vicious
clause, empowering the forthcoming legislature to alter the law in its
discretion, but it is undoubtedly true that no amendment conditioning
the suffrage upon education and property could pass the ordeal of a
popular vote. The politicians, however, were not to be discouraged by
this defeat, and accordingly they passed through the legislature the
bill which called the recent convention into being and made its
results final without popular ratification.

So far as the enlightened sentiment of the state was concerned, there
was undoubtedly, a strong desire for some change in the suffrage laws
to prevent the corruption which ignorance made easy, and the fraud and
violence which for years had filled law-respecting citizens with shame
and humiliation. Vitally connected with the suffrage, was the subject
of popular education; there was also the felt need of reforming the
judiciary system.

After long weeks of painful travail, the suffrage committee presented
an ordinance that filled the state with amazement, and was so palpably
unconstitutional and so grotesquely absurd that according to United
States Senator McEnery, it was regarded in Washington as a "joke." The
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