Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/586

582 the United States and Jamaica with reference to its negro population, however, shows us floundering far in the distance. How can English colonial conditions be paralleled without violence to our constitution? By a simple method, apparent to all, the adoption of which would work incalculable benefit to our nation. The canker of our present political condition as it affects the negro is the moral sore of a stultified conscience. Very naturally when the negro realizes that the constitution makes him politically the equal of any white man, while he knows he is an inferior individual, if indeed only in the sense that a child is inferior to an adult, he detects a first inconsistency. This he accepts; and views equal suffrage as a gift. But when he further realizes that equality of suffrage is a theory, which is disregarded in practise, he sees an inconsistency which he resents, and which moves him to loss of respect. This is the root of distrust and dissimulation and antagonism, which is at the source of the troubles which constitute our "negro problem." Skin color among mulattoes is no scientific index of potential civic worth.

In brief, a state's right of suffrage should be based upon reasonable and uniform qualifications applied actually, as verbally, to all alike of whatever color (and finally sex). No ballot is free from the potentiality of great ill, unless it be cast by an honest, thrifty and intelligent hand. Appropriate educational and property qualifications uniform for all members of a state, and probably as between states, is a reasonable, just and right requirement. This is a first step, for which we already have the light of reason. Further steps must be taken more or less cautiously coincidentlycoincidentally [sic] with accumulating scientific data. The "problem" is bright with hope; but it must be approached with charity and consistency and with scientific skill and courage.