The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-11-04

that emancipation can do is to prevent the
master from appropriating the future earnings
of the freedman; but if slavery is unjust the
stripping him Of his past earnings was rob
berry, or at least extortiOn and to the property
thus eXtorted and kept the master has no
rlghttul title. 1t should in justice be re-
funded, like all other property wrongfully
taken. If the master and former slave are
both living it should pass directly to its true
owner, with the accumulated interest. If mas
ter and slave are both dead, it should pass
from the heirs of the one to the heirs of the
other, with interest for the intervening period.
Slavery being form of robbery, all the earn
ings of which the negroes were deprived during
generations of slavery are fairly the property
of themselves if living, or their heirs if dead.
But the accumulated wages Of all the negroes
during the period of slavery, with the accrued
interest thereon, would exceed the whole value
of the property now existing in the South; the
present property consisting merely of the
savings out of the annual products of the
slaves, the greater part Of which was spent
from year to year, and large share of the re-
sidue in the late war. The whole argument
may be condensed into single sentence in the
months of the negroes:-''If il was wrong to
keep us in slavery, our late masters owe us
our unpaid wages; all the property they hold
is therefore ours and having become their
political masters, we Willsenforce restitution"
This argument is not without plausibility,
and the poverty and cupidity of the negroes
will give it ready reception. 1t is certain to
be the pivot of their political action under the
reconstructed governments. Every candidate,
white or black, who solicits their votes, will
be compelled to give pledges on this cardinal
question.
Now what will be the consequences of such
a claim, set up by needy race, in whose hands
the Republican party are putting governmental
machinery to enforce it? The consequences
will be so horrible that humane men will have
reason to shudder at the prospect. 1t avails
nothing to say that the claim of the negroes is
just; that their masters, for whom they toiled
without pay, really owe them restitution. 1t
is certain that the claim will be denied and
ressted-certain that the attempt to enforce it
will lead to all the horrors of war of
races. 1t will fill every neighbOrhood and
locality of the South with bloody violence,
exhibiting on an immense scale a state of
society like that which existed on a small
scale in Kansas ten or twelve years ago, but
more horrible in proportion as greater interests
are at stake. Men will shoot each other in
broad day; they will lurk about each others
dwellings in the darkness of the night, to set
them on fire and butcher the flying inmates.
Courts of justice and officers of the law will be
powerless to stay these horrors. No armies
which the Federal Government can raise can
arrest the carnage, because it will be scattered
over every inhabited square mile of the South.
If the negro claim to the Southern property
and the attempt to enforce it through the
reconstructed Governments do not lead to
these hideous consequences, there is no longer
any human nature in man.