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“The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law? Just as social adjustments promote justice, just as they acknowledge the equality of right between man and man, just as they insure to each the perfect liberty which is bounded only by the equal liberty of every other, must civilization advance. Just as they fail in this, must advancing civilization come to a halt and recede."-Henry George.

As was well said by President Harrison in 1890, “equality or representation and the parity of electors should be maintained, or everything that is valuable in our system of government is lost. The qualifications of an elector must be sought in the law, not in the opinions, prejudices or fears of any class, however powerful. The path of the elector to the ballot-box must be free from the ambush of fear and the enticements of fraud, and the count so true and open that none shall gainsay it." In the same President's Annual Message, 1980, he said: “Nothing just now is more important than to provide every guaranty for an absolutely fair and free choice, by an equal suffrage within the respective States, of all the officers of the national government, whether that suffrage is exercised directly, as in the choice of members of the House of Representatives, or indirectly, as in the choice of Senators and Electors for President. . . . If I were called upon to declare wherein our chief national danger lies, I should say, without hesitation, in the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of the popular suffrage. That there is a real danger here all men agree.

There never was a time when morally, politically and lawfully such processes of making the constitutional guarantees

effective would have progressed and would have been more certainly and effectually accomplished, than after the overwhelming electoral victory in 1904 on a national platform pledging the Republican party to that purpose. Never in political history has there been a more ignoble and abject abandonment of duty than the Republican failure in this respect to redeem the party pledge. It is not strange that a moral effect of such conduct should be a sectional and local paralysis of national supremacy and national power in all matters protecting the civic equality of individuals as guaranteed by the United States Government. Nor is it strange that the political leaders who have assisted materially in this degradation should have succeeded in suppressing or extinguishing from Southern political life the more liberal and progressive thinkers, speakers and writers who among them are occasionally heard from.

Probably a fair though deplorable statement of the attitude of some present leaders in the Republican party, or, to speak more exactly, of the followers among the remnant that once claimed to lead-and are leaving dubious tones for their successors-is found in a sort of valedictory speech delivered by exSenator John M. Spooner, in the Senate on January 15, 1907.

The mournful feature of that speech is the speaker's announcement that he is glad that a measure he had urged years ago, to enforce the Constitutional Amendments had not passed; and in that he assumes, but produces no evidence in support of his assumption, that the true interests of the country have thereby been promoted! Indeed, on the contrary, he himself portrays a distortion of the just equilibrium between the sections; and after stating an impregnable case of national importance, unjustifiably seems to surrender its disposition to the vicious issues of local determination. This is what he says:

"I realize as well as any man in the North the complicated and troublesome and, perhaps, in some ways dangerous situation as to both races

in the South. I am not able to say that in dealing with the Southern States at the end of the war measures were not adopted which, from the standpoint of to-day, might not better, in some aspects of it, have been pretermitted. In the situation as it presented itself to the Congress of Northern men, fresh from the struggle to suppress the Union, it was, of course, inevitable.

"It is always dangerous to confer the suffrage upon a mass of people unfitted by education for its exercise. I do not intend to advert, except by a word, to the fact that, as I understood it then, and as I understand it now, the suffrage was not secured to the colored man in a party interest, but to protect him, by giving the ballot as a weapon of defense, against codes, which you will find collated to some extent only in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan in the Slaughterhouses cases (109 U. S., 36), codes which were thought in the North practically to repudiate the pledge contained in Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, afterwards written by the people into the Constitution of the United States.

"I am far from forgetting the difficulties which then beset the Southern people.

"It was difficult for Southern men to realize, when the Confederate flags were furled and laid away and they returned to their homes, that the black people whom they had left at home as slaves, had become when they next looked upon their faces free men. It was a sudden dislocation of a long-continued status, and of course it took time to adjust their relations to it.

"We once attempted-I did my part of it, for which I have never apologized, nor will I—to safeguard, in the interest of the people at large, the right of the colored man to vote in accordance with the constitutional amendments. That bill did not pass. I have been glad it did not pass, although I did honestly all that I could to secure its passage. That it did not pass has been better, I think, for the white men of the South and infinitely better for the colored men of the South, where the Anglo-Saxon and the negro race live side by side and will continue so to live, doubtless, as long as this government lasts.

"They can live in peace, I hope and pray and believe. It will require the utmost of patience and calmness and justice on the part of the white people of the South. The colored men are not cowards; they are ambitious. They are human beings; they were born in this country; they were made by the Fourteenth Amendment citizens of the United States.

"In respect of the suffrage, which the Southern States have adjusted to suit themselves, their administration of it has been left without Con

gressional interference, even without recent agitation. Of course, our people feel that the just constitutional equilibrium between the States has been distorted and disarranged because of the situation. The South has a large representation in the Electoral College and in the House of Representatives because of the colored vote. The vote has been decreased in one way and another, but the representation has remained.

"Senators will bear me witness that it is a good many years since this subject has been discussed at all on this side of the Chamber. When I first came to the Senate is was often debated with a violence which is almost always inseparable from it. Silence upon it has not been a surrender except in this way, that it has come to be felt by our people at large that the delicate and difficult problem down there CAN BE BEST SETTLED WITHOUT

AGITATION FROM WITHOUT.

"Now, Mr. President, I think the Fourteenth Amendement of the Constitution, which makes the colored man and all persons born in this country citizens of the United States, which guarantees to them equality before the law, the equal protection of the laws, and those rights of liberty, conscience, property, to which all men are entitled in any decent government, must live. I have no notion that the great body of the people of any section of this country think otherwise. The law must be equally a shield for all entitled to its protection; and I feel sometimes when I recall the conversations I had years ago with some splendid and chivalrous ex-Confederate soldiers who have gone from this Chamber, and some still here, upon this difficult and sensitive subject in the South, that it requires more than any other problem in history patience, considerateness, and justice on the part of the leaders of Southern thought, instead of vehemence and vituperation."

Senator Spooner said further: "If my recollection serves me aright, I have heard great denunciation at times against the legislation of Congress in the reconstruction acts and in various acts which affected sections, and in the light of to-day we can all see action by the Congress which was unwise." *

Now these views, while purporting to represent the average sentiments of the experienced legislative expert in compromises for the sake of securing projected enactments, would probably not, if put to the test, represent the fundamental beliefs of the great body of thoughtful Republicans reared in the history, the traditions, the principles, the high ideals and patriotic * Senator Spooner's Speech, Cong. Rec., Jan. 19, 1907, p. 1399, p. 1390.

accomplishments of the Republican party. That party at heart still believes, as was expressed by Mr. Blaine, that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments will be "vindicated and enforced in letter and in spirit."*

That prediction thus far fails of fulfilment because of the alliances-like those in the declining days of slavery-of Northern capital with the Southern oligarchy, and because of the nullification in many sections of the Constitutional Amendments which are results of the war. This nullification exists, and is a fact, however it may be suppressed or obscured by specious technicalities.

Ever since the second Cleveland Administration when the Democracy had control of both houses of Congress, a national election law having already failed of enactment, a vigorous movement has been conducted to abridge, deny or destroy the civil and political rights of the colored people in the South.† The full force of this insidious and aggressive propaganda is being felt by the present generation, who see at first hand, without stopping to enquire how it came about, a practical nullification of the War Amendments.

That this is so may be abundantly proved. A leading Southern Senator, already quoted in these pages, in August, 1906, at a Spiritualist-camp-Sunday-afternoon meeting declared that "the people of the South considered the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as mere pieces of paper and a bit wasted ink.”

The New York World recently called attention to the action of the Florida Legislature in which it was proposed to nullify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by a joint resolution! The World article ran, in part, like this:

* Vol. II, p. 421, "Twenty Years in Congress."

† A Senator (Patterson of Colorado) said: "

There is rapidly being organized

in the South a movement to demand that the North unite with the South in the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment and practical return of the negroes of the country to a condition of peonage." Cong. Rec, 1060 (Jan. 12, 1907). See Appendix N.