Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/53

Rh contest. As a political organization, it lacks brains, sound leadership, and generous ideas.

So far as mere statesmanship is concerned, the Republican party is no better off than its rival; but it has shown itself to be more ready to conform to the changing aspects of public affairs, and generous, if not wise, in its various programmes of action. In demanding universal suffrage, without respect to race or color, it has placed itself in accord with the spirit of the age. The tendency of modern thought and civilization everywhere is toward the widest possible extension of the right of suffrage. But the Republican party undertook to run faster than public sentiment. It is one thing to advocate an ideally perfect scheme of representation, but quite another to insist upon giving the elective franchise to a mass of ignorant negroes, and at the same time withhold it from the politically-educated whites. For this, the country is not yet prepared. The Republican party must expect defeat if it insists upon the adoption of negro suffrage in the shape that it has assumed in the Southern States. What, then, must it do to carry the next Presidential election?

1. It must nominate Ulysses S. Grant as its candidate for the Presidency.

2. It must thoroughly reform our Internal Revenue system; must reduce the tax on whiskey to one dollar a gallon, so as to remove the temptation to defraud the Government; it must pass laws throwing open positions in the Revenue Department and Custom House to all applicants, without regard to party, after competitive examinations; in other words it must pass some such bill for the reform of our civil service as that proposed by Mr. Jenckes at the last session of Congress.

3. Concerning reconstruction, it must adopt something like the following programme and apply it to the States which will ask admission under their new constitutions: (a) Universal amnesty. (b) Equal rights of the white and black races before the law. (c) Impartial, not universal, suffrage, (d) An educational qualification for voting, such as the ability to read and write and solve a problem by the Rule of Three to the satisfaction of an impartial tribunal appointed by the General Government, (e) A provision to be inserted in every new State Constitution for the compulsory education of the whites and blacks in the Southern States.

This programme, or one of similar import, ought to be satisfactory to the entire Southern people, both whites and blacks. Universal amnesty would permit all the whites to vote, whereas great numbers are now denied that right. The educational test would give the rehabilitation of the Southern States to the white majority, with whom the North, excepting an inconsiderable faction wish it to be. Equal rights with the whites before the law would be