you in Massachusetts would be banded if
300,000 men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot--banded in
race instinct holding against you the memory of a century of slavery,
taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already
travestied legislation from your State House, and in every species of
folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.

But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous
menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long
been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and
officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on
our part. Let us see. Virginia--a State now under fierce assault for
this alleged crime--cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent. of her vote,
Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent. of her vote.
Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last
month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts,
fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent. of hers. If
Virginia is condemned because thirty-one per cent. of her vote was
silent, how shall this State escape in which fifty-one per cent. was
dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in '88
cast sixty-seven per cent. of their total vote--the six New England
States but sixty-three per cent. of theirs. By what fair rule shall the
stigma be put upon one section, while the other escapes? A congressional
election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every
voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of
opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State,
in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years and the
polling places are miles apart--under the unfair reasoning of which my
section has been a constant victim--the small vote is charged to be
proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of
12,000, under hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000;
in Iowa, in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out and an
opposition majority of 8,000 was established. The change of 40,000 votes
in Iowa is accepted as political revolution--in Virginia an increase of
30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud.

It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the
vote is not regularly ca