Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 30.djvu/345

 Rh sold at a good price to the authorities in Washington. Do any wonder that a Republican party exists in the South, on which that party has brought nothing but blight and ruin for a generation and more? Outside of Heaven there was never a place where a ruler with even one-tenth of what the President and his dependents have to bestow could lack a following. That so few have surrendered to the temptation when that way lay the only opening to political preferment is an honor to the South. But many now who neither seek nor want office are finding out how pleasing it is to be the dominant section, to be assured that they were right in reforming the Union by force in 1861-65, especially those of that section who, seeing the great evils that have come and are coming from a centralized and imperial Federal Union, are having misgivings as to the wisdom, if not the justice, of a forced Union. And many roads to success outside of politics are made easier by such subservience, given, it may be said, more or less unconsciously, but not the less pleasing to the recipients on that account. To agree with the dominant party on that point makes it easy to vote with it, and the wonderful success of that party for the last forty years is very persuasive to win adherents.

To Southerners the fate of the negro is a matter of deep interest; the poor negro whose behavior in the war between the States was worthy of all praise, and whose conduct since has been far better than could have been expected, considering the false position into which he has been forced by his unwise friends in the North. Is not their condition far worse than in 1860, as to the great mass of them? And does it not promise to be worse as time goes on and the hostility between the races steadily increases? Will disfranchising them make them content and submissive and put a stop to the dreadful lynchings and burnings and their dreadful cause (which leads to them almost inevitably, though it cannot justify them), while the great body of Christendom sympathizes with them and considers them as tricked out of their right to vote? Many hope so, but does the present strong tendency in the world toward universal suffrage make it a reasonable hope?

In building monuments to Davis and Lee, Jackson and Stuart we are declaring to the world and to future generations that the cause for which Lee fought and Jackson and Stuart and many thousands of our bravest and best died was a good and glorious cause, the cause of constitutional liberty, and that those who fought against that cause, however unconscious of it they may have been, were fighting