Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/97

 sands have done. Their disfranchisement is thus not intrinsic and complete, but merely a function of their residence, like that of all persons, white or black, who live in the District of Columbia, and so it takes on a secondary and trivial character, as hay-fever, in the pathological categories, takes on a secondary and trivial character by yielding to a change of climate. Moreover, it is always extra-legal, and thus remains dubious: the theory of the fundamental law is that the coloured folk may and do vote. This theory they could convert into a fact at any time by determined mass action. The Nordics might resist that action, but they could not halt it: there would be another Civil War if they tried to do so, and they would be beaten a second time. If the blacks in the backwaters of the South keep away from the polls to-day it is only because they do not esteem the ballot highly enough to risk the dangers that go with trying to use it. That fact, it seems to me, convicts them of unfitness for citizenship in a democratic state, for the loftiest of all the rights of the citizen, by the democratic dogma, is that of the franchise, and whoever is not willing to fight for it, even at the cost of his last drop of gore, is