And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the
fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this conti-
nent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic
training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a
solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and
to the peril of his children's children,--in this day, when we
are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we
going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to
tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of
human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to
give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest?
I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge
the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have
pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in
the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and
frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the
disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from
politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the
main question of the industrial and intellectual development
of the Negro? Can we establish a mass of black laborers and
artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and public
opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under
which they live and work? Can the modern organization of
industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and
the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel re-
spect for their welfare,--can this system be carried out in the
South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public
councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the black
man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much
he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to
who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to
who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made.
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