Chapter VIII (5)

And when an outraged people turn to government for help what do they find? Their government in the hands of a party that is in sympathy with their oppressors—that was returned to power with votes purchased with their money—and whose confessed leaders declared that trusts are largely private concerns with which the government had naught to do. Not only is the dominant party the apologist of the plutocrats and the beneficiary of their crimes, but it is based on that principle of centralization through which they came into life and on which alone they can exist. It holds that sovereignty should be taken from the States and lodged with the nation—that political powers and privileges should be wrested from the people and guarded at the capital. It distrusts the people, and even now demands that your ballot-boxes shall be hedged about by its bayonets. It declares that a strong government is better than a free government, and that national authority, backed by national armies and treasury, is a better guarantee of peace and prosperity and liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people. To defend this policy, that cannot be maintained by argument or sustained by the love or confidence of the people, it rallies under its flag the mercenaries of the Republic, the syndicate, the trust, the monopolist, and the plutocrat, and strengthening them by grant and protection, rejoices as they grow richer and the people grow poorer. Confident in the debauching power of money and the unscrupulous audacity of their creatures, they catch the spirit of Vanderbilt’s defiance and call aloud from their ramparts, “the people be damned!” I charge that this party has bought its way for twenty years. Its nucleus was the passion that survived the war—and around this it has gathered the protected manufacturer, the pensioned soldier, the licensed monopolist, the privileged corporation, the unchallenged trust—all whom power can daunt, or money can buy, and with these in close and constant phalanx it holds the government against the people. Not a man in all its ranks that is not influenced by prejudice or bought by privilege.

What a spectacle, my countrymen! This free Republic in the hands of a party that withdraws sovereignty from the people that its own authority may be made supreme—that fans the smouldering embers of war, and loosing among the people the dogs of privilege and monopoly to hunt, and harrow and rend, that its lines may be made stronger and its ramparts fortified. And now, it is committed to a crime that is without precedent or parallel in the history of any people, and this crime it is obliged by its own necessity as well as by its pledge to commit as soon as it gets the full reins of power. This crime is hidden in the bill known as the service pension bill, which pensions every man who enlisted for sixty days for the Union army. Let us examine this pension list. Twelve years ago it footed $46,000,000. Last year it was $81,000,000. This year it has already run to over $100,000,000. Of this amount Georgia pays about $3,500,000 a year. Think of it. The money that her people have paid, through indirect taxation into the treasury, is given, let us say to Iowa, for that State just equals Georgia in population. Every year $3,500,000 wrung from her pockets and sent into Iowa as pensions for her soldiers. Since 1865, out of her poverty, Georgia has paid $51,000,000 as pensions to Northern soldiers—one-sixth of the value of her whole property. And now it is proposed to enlarge the pension list until it includes every man who enlisted for sixty days. They will not fail. The last Congress passed a pension bill that Commissioner Black—himself a gallant Union general—studied deliberately, and then told the President that if he signed it, it would raise the pension list to $200,000,000, and had it not been for the love of the people that ran in the veins of Grover Cleveland and the courage of Democracy which flamed in his heart, that bill would have been law to-day. A worse bill will be offered. There is a surplus of $120,000,000 in the treasury. While that remains it endangers the protective tariff, behind which the trained captains of the Republican party muster their men. But let the pension list be lifted to $200,000,000 a year. Then the surplus is gone and a deficiency created, and the protective tariff must be not only perpetuated but deepened, and the vigilance of the spies and collectors increased to meet the demands of the government. And back of it all will be mustered the army of a million and a half pensioners, drawing their booty from the Republican party and giving it in turn their purchased allegiance and support.

My countrymen, a thousand times I have thought of that historic scene beneath the apple-tree at Appomattox, of Lee’s 8000 ragged, half-starved immortals, going home to begin anew amid the ashes of their homes, and the graves of their dead, the weary struggle for existence, and Grant’s 68,000 splendid soldiers, well fed and equipped, going home to riot amid the plenty of a grateful and prosperous people, and I have thought how hard it was that out of our poverty we should be taxed to pay their pension, and to divide with this rich people the crust we scraped up from the ashes of our homes. And I have thought when their maimed and helpless soldiers were sheltered in superb homes, and lapped in luxury, while our poor cripples limped along the highway or hid their shame in huts, or broke bitter bread in the county poor-house, how hard it was that, of all the millions we send them annually, we can save not one dollar to go to our old heroes, who deserve so much and get so little. And yet we made no complaint. We were willing that every Union soldier made helpless by the war should have his pension and his home, and thank God, without setting our crippled soldiers on the curbstone of distant Babylons to beg, as blind Belisarius did, from the passing stranger. We have provided them a home in which they can rest in honorable peace until God has called them hence to a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. We have not complained that our earnings have gone to pension Union soldiers—the maimed soldiers of the Union armies. But the scheme to rob the people that every man who enlisted for sixty days, or his widow, shall be supported at public expense is an outrage that must not be submitted to. It is not patriotism—it is politics. It is not honesty—it is plunder. The South has played a patient and a waiting game for twenty years, fearing to protest against what she knew to be wrong in the fear that she would be misunderstood. I fear that she has gained little by this course save the contempt of her enemies. The time has come when she should stand upright among the States of this Republic and declare her mind and stand by her convictions. She must not stand silent while this crowning outrage is perpetrated. It means that the Republican party will loot the treasury to recruit its ranks—that $70,000,000 a year shall be taken from the South to enrich the North, thus building up one section against another—that the protective tariff shall be deepened, thus building one class against another, and that the party of trusts and monopoly shall be kept in power, the autonomy of the Republic lost, the government centralized, the oligarchs established, and justice to the people postponed. But this party will not prevail, even though its pension bill should pass, and its pretorial God be established in every Northern State. It was Louis XVI. who peddled the taxing privileges to his friends, and when the people protested surrounded himself with an army of Swiss mercenaries. His minister, Neckar, said to him: “Sire, I beseech you send away these Swiss and trust your people”; but the king, confident in his strength and phalanx, buckled it close about him and plundered the people until his head paid the penalty of his crime. So this party, bartering privileges and setting up classes, may feel secure as it closes the ranks of its mercenaries, but some day the great American heart will burst with righteous wrath, and the voice of the people, which is the voice of God, will challenge the traitors, and the great masses will rise in their might, and breaking down the defenses of the oligarchs, will hurl them from power and restore this Republic to the old moorings from which it had been swept by the storm.

The government can protect its citizens. It is of the people, and it shall not perish from the face of the earth. It can top off these colossal fortunes and, by an income tax, retard their growth. It can set a limit to personal and corporate wealth. It can take trusts and syndicates by the throat. It can shatter monopoly; it can equalize the burden of taxation; it can distribute its privileges impartially; it can clothe with credit its land now discredited at its banks; it can lift the burdens from the farmer’s shoulders, give him equal strength to bear them—it can trust the people in whose name this Republic was founded; in whose courage it was defended; in whose wisdom it has been administered, and whose stricken love and confidence it can not survive.

But the government, no matter what it does, does not do all that is needed, nor the most; that is conceded, for all true reform must begin with the people at their homes. A few Sundays ago I stood on a hill in Washington. My heart thrilled as I looked on the towering marble of my country’s Capitol, and a mist gathered in my eyes as, standing there, I thought of its tremendous significance and the powers there assembled, and the responsibilities there centered—its presidents, its congress, its courts, its gathered treasure, its army, its navy, and its 60,000,000 of citizens. It seemed to me the best and mightiest sight that the sun could find in its wheeling course—this majestic home of a Republic that has taught the world its best lessons of liberty—and I felt that if wisdom, and justice, and honor abided therein, the world would stand indebted to this temple on which my eyes rested, and in which the ark of my covenant was lodged for its final uplifting and regeneration.

A few days later I visited a country home. A modest, quiet house sheltered by great trees and set in a circle of field and meadow, gracious with the promise of harvest—barns and cribs well filled and the old smoke-house odorous with treasure—the fragrance of pink and hollyhock mingling with the aroma of garden and orchard, and resonant with the hum of bees and poultry’s busy clucking—inside the house, thrift, comfort and that cleanliness that is next to godliness—the restful beds, the open fireplace, the books and papers, and the old clock that had held its steadfast pace amid the frolic of weddings, that had welcomed in steady measure the newborn babes of the family, and kept company with the watchers of the sick bed, and had ticked the solemn requiem of the dead; and the well-worn Bible that, thumbed by fingers long since stilled, and blurred with tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of the family, and the heart and conscience of the home. Outside stood the master, strong and wholesome and upright; wearing no man’s collar; with no mortgage on his roof, and no lien on his ripening harvest; pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and selling them in his own time in his chosen market; master of his lands and master of himself. Near by stood his aged father, happy in the heart and home of his son. And as they started to the house the old man’s hands rested on the young man’s shoulder, touching it with the knighthood of the fourth commandment, and laying there the unspeakable blessing of an honored and grateful father. As they drew near the door the old mother appeared; the sunset falling on her face, softening its wrinkles and its tenderness, lighting up her patient eyes, and the rich music of her heart trembling on her lips, as in simple phrase she welcomed her husband and son to their home. Beyond was the good wife, true of touch and tender, happy amid her household cares, clean of heart and conscience, the helpmate and the buckler of her husband. And the children, strong and sturdy, trooping down the lane with the lowing herd, or weary of simple sport, seeking, as truant birds do, the quiet of the old home nest. And I saw the night descend on that home, falling gently as from the wings of the unseen dove. And the stars swarmed in the bending skies—the trees thrilled with the cricket’s cry—the restless bird called from the neighboring wood—and the father, a simple man of God, gathering the family about him, read from the Bible the old, old story of love and faith, and then went down in prayer, the baby hidden amid the folds of its mother’s dress, and closed the record of that simple day by calling down the benediction of God on the family and the home!

And as I gazed the memory of the great Capitol faded from my brain. Forgotten its treasure and its splendor. And I said, “Surely here—here in the homes of the people is lodged the ark of the covenant of my country. Here is its majesty and its strength. Here the beginning of its power and the end of its responsibility.” The homes of the people; let us keep them pure and independent, and all will be well with the Republic. Here is the lesson our foes may learn—here is work the humblest and weakest hands may do. Let us in simple thrift and economy make our homes independent. Let us in frugal industry make them self-sustaining. In sacrifice and denial let us keep them free from debt and obligation. Let us make them homes of refinement in which we shall teach our daughters that modesty and patience and gentleness are the charms of woman. Let us make them temples of liberty, and teach our sons that an honest conscience is every man’s first political law. That his sovereignty rests beneath his hat, and that no splendor can rob him and no force justify the surrender of the simplest right of a free and independent citizen. And above all, let us honor God in our homes—anchor them close in His love. Build His altars above our hearthstones, uphold them in the set and simple faith of our fathers and crown them with the Bible—that book of books in which all the ways of life are made straight and the mystery of death is made plain. The home is the source of our national life. Back of the national Capitol and above it stands the home. Back of the President and above him stands the citizen. What the home is, this and nothing else will the Capitol be. What the citizen wills, this and nothing else will the President be.

Now, my friends, I am no farmer. I have not sought to teach you the details of your work, for I know little of them. I have not commended your splendid local advantages, for that I shall do elsewhere. I have not discussed the differences between the farmer and other classes, for I believe in essential things there is no difference between them, and that minor differences should be sacrificed to the greater interest that depends on a united people. I seek not to divide our people, but to unite them. I should despise myself if I pandered to the prejudice of either class to win the applause of the other.

But I have noted these great movements that destroy the equilibrium and threaten the prosperity of my country, and standing above passion and prejudice or demagoguery I invoke every true citizen, fighting from his hearthstone outward, with the prattle of his children on his ear, and the hand of his wife and mother closely clasped, to determine here to make his home sustaining and independent, and to pledge eternal hostility to the forces that threaten our liberties, and the party that stands behind it.

When I think of the tremendous force of the currents against which we must fight, of the great political party that impels that fight, of the countless host of mercenaries that fight under its flag, of the enormous powers of government privilege and monopoly that back them up, I confess my heart sinks within me, and I grow faint. But I remember that the servant of Elisha looked abroad from Samaria and beheld the hosts that encompassed the city, and said in agonized fear: “Alas, master, what shall we do?” and the answer of Elisha was the answer of every brave man and faithful heart in all ages: “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them,” and this faith opened the eyes of the servant of the man of God, and he looked up again, and lo, the air was filled with chariots of fire, and the mountains were filled with horsemen, and they compassed the city about as a mighty and unconquerable host. Let us fight in such faith, and fear not. The air all about us is filled with chariots of unseen allies, and the mountains are thronged with unseen knights that shall fight with us. Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. Buckle on your armor, gird about your loins, stand upright and dauntless while I summon you to the presence of the immortal dead. Your fathers and mine yet live, though they speak not, and will consecrate this air with their wheeling chariots, and above them and beyond them to the Lord God Almighty, King of the Hosts in whose unhindered splendor we stand this morning. Look up to them, be of good cheer, and faint not, for they shall fight with us when we strike for liberty and truth, and all the world, though it be banded against us, shall not prevail against them.

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AT THE BOSTON BANQUET.

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IN HIS SPEECH AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE BOSTON MERCHANTS’ ASSOCIATION
IN DECEMBER, 1889, MR. GRADY SAID:

MR. PRESIDENT: Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of the race problem—forbidden by occasion to make a political speech—I appreciate in trying to reconcile orders with propriety the predicament of the little maid who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, “Now, go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don’t go near the water.”

The stoutest apostle of the church, they say, is the missionary, and the missionary, wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston’s banquet hall, and discuss the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr. President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and estrangement, if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and to strengthen an untried arm—then, sir, I find the courage to proceed.

Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here, within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure—carved from the ocean and the wilderness—its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base—while startled kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers—and prosper the fortunes of their living sons—and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.

Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done everywhere, every word I then uttered—to declare that the sentiments I then avowed were universally approved in the South—I realize that the confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess, Mr. President—before the praise of New England has died on my lips—that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of 17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots, and gone back home to pray for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000 Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help them—and may their sturdy tribe increase!

Far to the south, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line, once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There, is centered all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate, above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There, are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests, vast and primeval, and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wool—that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly—in iron, proven supremacy—in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic. From this assured and permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in Divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest—not set amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit—this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world.

That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home—a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting, in its material excellence, for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet, while in the Eldorado of which I have told you, but 15 per cent. of lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to Texas—while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England stands a son, seeking with troubled eyes some new land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the South had fewer Northern-born citizens than she had in 1870—fewer in ’70 than in ’60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it was crimson with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard every inch of its way?

There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing, sir, but this problem, and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices at Manassas and Gettysburg, and illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon’s mouth.

If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night—hear one thing more. My people, your brothers in the South—brothers in blood, in destiny, in all that is best in our past and future—are so beset with this problem that their very existence depends upon its right solution. Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the Republic sailed from your ports—the slaves worked in our fields. You will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do hereby declare that in its wise and humane administration, in lifting the slave to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom—our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from the American soil. But the freedman remains. With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—with equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility—each pledged against fusion—one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war—the experiment sought by neither, but approached by both with doubt—these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to the end.

Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this Republic because he is an alien and inferior. The red man was owner of the land—the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable—but they hindered both sections and are gone! But the black man, affecting but one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity. It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded, without rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however similar, have lived anywhere at any time on the same soil with equal rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American prejudice—to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks—and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—a rigor that accepts no excuse—and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy—with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood—and that when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving hearts.

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South—the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means—what they owe to this kindly and dependent race—the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!

Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr. President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible, and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place, to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty—wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard—guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and irresponsible of either race—compensating error with frankness, and retrieving in patience what they lose in passion—and conscious all the time that wrong means ruin,—admit this, and we may reach an understanding to-night.

The President of the United States in his late message to Congress, discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem, asks: “Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights that are his?” I shall not here protest against the partisanry that, for the first time in our history in time of peace, has stamped with the great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and loyal section, though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier who held the helm of state for the eight stormiest years of reconstruction never found need for such a step; and though there is no personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir, backed by a record on every page of which is progress, I venture to make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. I bespeak your patience, while with vigorous plainness of speech, seeking your judgment rather than your applause, I proceed step by step. We give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth $45,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses and fruit. This enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the singing plow.

It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of its just hire. I present the tax-books of Georgia, which show that the negro, 25 years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000 of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor him, and vindicate his neighbors? What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than $1,000,000—and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered—of the fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for $10,000,000, and yet 49 per cent. of the beneficiaries are black children—and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston. Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of little, the South with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth as much public land, and having back of its tax-books none of the half billion of bonds that enrich the North—and though it pays annually $26,000,000 to your section as pensions—yet gives nearly one-sixth of the public-school fund. The South since 1865 has spent $122,000,000 in education, and this year is pledged to $37,000,000 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 the greater need or 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 the 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 60 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 1865 is in jail—in the South only one in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as great as 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 be seriously maintained that we are terrorizing the people from whose willing hands come every year $1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people, who twenty-five years from unrewarded slavery have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every day? Or deceive them when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our ability? Or outlaw them when we work side by side with them? Or re-enslave them under legal forms when for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of law? My fellow countryman, as you yourself may sometimes have to appeal to the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these incontestible facts.

But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence. This I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely it is misjudged! It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition, inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion. Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an incident—in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons, and it scarcely arrests attention—a chance collision in the South among relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was ungrateful to the colored soldiers who followed its flag, because a Grand Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran, as for you to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either section, and belie American character by declaring them to be significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and the sin of our poor fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that society, sentient and responsible in every fibre, can mend and repair until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither. These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia’s busy life as they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And if they did, not one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is through them, and the men who think with them—making nine-tenths of every southern community—that these two races have been carried thus far with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness—more than in all the laws that can be passed or all the bayonets that can be mustered—is the hope of our future.

When will the black cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and shiftless—then and not till then will the ballot of the negro be free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks—not in sectional estrangement, not in the hope of political dominion—but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is this vast ignorant and purchasable vote—clannish, credulous, impulsive and passionate—tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a faction—strong enough in every community to control on the slightest division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed on, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses misdirected—and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as this—the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every southern community has drunk deeply—that the white people of the South are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if 300,000 black 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 statehouse, 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 75 per cent. of her vote. Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, 60 per cent. of her vote. Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last month Virginia cast 69 per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts, fighting in every district, cast only 49 per cent. of hers. If Virginia is condemned because 31 per cent. of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape in which 51 per cent. was dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen southern States in 1888 cast 67 per cent. of their total vote—the six New England States but 63 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 6000 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 10,000, 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 8000 was established. The change of 42,000 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. I charge these facts and figures home, sir, to the heart and conscience of the American people, who will not assuredly see one section condemned for what another section is excused!

If I can drive them through the prejudice of the partisan, and have them read and pondered at the fireside of the citizen, I will rest on the judgment there formed and the verdict there rendered!

It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the vote is not regularly cast, but more inexplicable that this should be so in New England than in the South. What invites the negro to the ballot-box? He knows that, of all men, it has promised him most and yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of “forty acres and a mule.” His second, the threat that Democratic success meant his re-inslavement. Both have proved false in his experience. He looked for a home, and he got the freedman’s bank. He fought under the promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his neighbors, with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in his—and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss of their confidence and sympathy that is at last his best and his enduring hope. And so, without leaders or organization—and lacking the resolute heroism of my party friends in Vermont that makes their hopeless march over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage—he shrewdly measures the occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches up his mule and jogs down the furrow, letting the mad world jog as it will!

The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if partisans in the North would understand this. I have seen the white people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and touching their eyes with faith, bid them look abroad to see the very air “filled with the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” If there is any human force that cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law or divorced in force. It is the inalienable right of every free community—and the just and righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or shotgun; but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it all the powers of the earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white race—that before the moral and material power of her people once more unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was left alone vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts—as that night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to Federal election law, you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not exist, that the very form of this government may be changed—this old State that holds in its charter the boast that “it is a free and independent commonwealth”—it may deliver its election machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create—but never, sir, will a single State of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race. We wrested our State government from negro supremacy when the Federal drumbeat rolled closer to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district of the South, we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to prevent its re-establishment!

I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the South divided may walk in peace and honor, I will take that path though I took it alone—for at the end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the Republic united. His enfranchisement—against which I enter no protest—holds the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply report progress and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at all—and I firmly believe it will, though nowhere else has it been—it will be solved by the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honor to its solution. I had rather see my people render back this question lightly solved than to see them gather all the spoils over which faction has contended since Catiline conspired and Cæsar fought. Meantime we treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the fullness the strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of citizenship that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every pursuit in which he can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and capacity. We seek to hold his confidence and friendship, and to pin him to the soil with ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own hearthstone that sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know. And we gather him into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility that, though it now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible and intelligent of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment and justified in the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly but surely to the end.

The love we feel for that race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling into sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak, and I catch a vision of an old Southern home, with its lofty pillars, and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands—now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man—as they lay a mother’s blessing there while at her knees—the truest altar I yet have found—I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin or guard at her chamber door, puts a black man’s loyalty between her and danger.

I catch another vision. The crisis of battle—a soldier struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling death—bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life in his master’s stead. I see him by the weary bedside, ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and in honor to still the soldier’s agony and seal the soldier’s life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice saying: “Follow him! Put your arms about him in his need, even as he puts his about me. Be his friend as he was mine.” And out into this new world—strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both—I follow! And may God forget my people—when they forget these!