Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/367

 pains, in some bookstore loungings, to inquire about this. I learned in nearly every case that the negroes were constant purchasers, and almost invariably of school-books—elementary and advanced. I am told that the negro is as anxious to read and write as he used to be to own a yellow cravat. I do not suppose this education goes far, but it is something. It is there I see day—there, and nowhere else. This old feeling must die out. These memories of the Southern Confederacy must be put away with the family laces and grandmother' samplers. Leaders like Toombs and Hill must be superseded. These negroes must be taught that freedom means responsibility, and that honesty is safety and peace. These lands and ports, these watercourses, these widely stretching and vast acres, must respond to capital and energy, the money and the skill of the North. Here is room in South Carolina alone for all of New England, and in no State could the spirit of New England work such marvels. But so long as the fogs of slavery and misgovernment and ostracism and social hatred hang over them like the malaria of their own rice lowlands, so long South Carolina will be a prostrate State, crying for sympathy and help. Let us trust that the time has come for the people to help themselves, and in doing so, raise their Commonwealth to a pinacle of grandeur and prosperity such as even its proud history has never known.

The burden of the song of the Chamberlain Ring and their organs is that the integrity of "the party" is of more consequence than honest government, and that any Republican who votes for Green and Delaney is a traitor to the Republican party and false to Republican principles. In all humility we beg leave to suggest that the persons who are candidates for office in the interest of a corrupt Ring, and the few newspapers which live and move and have their being by and in that Ring, are hardly the disinterested and unselfish counsellors that they claim to be. It is safer to go outside of the charmed circle, and ascertain what is advised by Republicans whose honesty is as great as their integrity, who were Republicans when Democracy was in the ascendant, and who are as true now to Republicanism as they were while slavery existed and most of the South Carolina white Republicans were red-hot Democrats in the