Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/338

322 "No man can have respect for the Government and officers of the law when he knows, deep down in his heart, that the exercise of the franchise is tainted with fraud.

"The road that the South has been compelled to travel during the last thirty years has been strewn with thorns and thistles. It has been as one groping through the long darkness into the light. The time is not far distant when the world will begin to appreciate the real character of the burden that was imposed upon the South when four million ex-slaves, ignorant and impoverished, were given the franchise. No people has ever been given such a problem to solve. History has blazed no path through the wilderness that could be followed. For thirty years we have wandered in the wilderness. We are now beginning to get out. But there is only one road out, and all makeshifts, expedients, profit-and-loss calculations, but lead into swamps, quicksands, quagmires, and jungles. There is a highway that will lead both races out into the pure, beautiful sunshine, where there will be nothing to hide and nothing to explain, where both races can grow strong and true and useful in every fiber of their being. I believe that your convention will find this highway; that it will enact a fundamental law that will be absolutely just and fair to white and black alike.

"I beg of you, further, that in the degree that you close the ballot box against the ignorant you open the schoolhouse. More than one half of the population of your State are negroes. No State can long prosper when a large part of its citizenship is in ignorance and poverty, and has no interest in government. I beg of you that you do not treat us as an alien people. We are not aliens. You know us; you know that we have cleared your forests, tilled your fields, nursed your children, and protected your families. There is an attachment between us that few understand. While I do not presume to be able to advise you, yet it is in my heart to say that if your convention would do something that would prevent for all time strained relations between the two races, and would permanently settle the matter of political relations in one Southern State, at least, let the very best educational opportunities be provided for both races; and add to this an election law that shall be incapable of unjust discrimination, at the same time providing that in proportion as the ignorant secure education, property, and character, they will be given the right of citizenship. Any other course will take from one half your citizens interest in the State, and hope and ambition to become intelligent producers and taxpayers, to become useful and virtuous citizens. Any other course will tie the white citizens of Louisiana to a body of death.

"The negroes are not unmindful of the fact that the white