ugh it pays annually $26,000,000
to your section as pensions--yet gives nearly one-sixth to the public
school fund. The South, since 1865, has spent $122,000,000 in education,
and this year is pledged to $32,000,000 more for State and city schools,
although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes, get nearly
one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and blacks
working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our shops
at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower
wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are permitted,
because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their feet are
fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of white
universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a hundred
useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it better and
wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the
window.

In the South there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their
race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military
companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and
societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the
testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced
felonies to misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating
punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this
dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record sixty
per cent. of the prosecutors are negroes, and in every court the negro
criminal strikes the colored juror, that white men may judge his case.

In the North, one negro in every 185 is in jail--in the South only one
in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as
great as that of native whites, in the South, only four times as great.
If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be
deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and
upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion,
that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life,
liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a
negro, apt to be over-reached, oppressed--and that this advantage
reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring
his sentence.

Now, Mr. President, can it