The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-06-08
THE NEW YORK PRESS.
HDfToRIAn OPINIONS OF THE LEADING JOURNALS
Upon CURRENT ToPICs-COMPIhED EVERY
nav voR THE EVENING TELEGRAPH.
Another southern ChevsIIer.

Ex-Governor Perry, Of South Carolina, is
writing letters in the papers of his State loudly
poniuring his fellow-citizens to vote against
the Constitutional Convention called under the
Reconstruction act, and singing the superiority
of military government over any species OF
government in which negroes are allowed to
share, and, in fact, talking in the wild, sense
less. and usually impractical way with which
Southern statesmen have made the world so
familiar. His last letter is an unusually good
specimen of his STYLE After discussing the
duties of Southern men from the honorable"
point of view, and showing that negroes must
not be allowed to vote in South Carolina
because the English Commonwealth of "l64O, !"
the French republics of 1892 and of 184S, and
the Mexican republic of our own day, had all
proved failures, he Enthusiastically winds up
with quoting Spontaneous efuslon OF a
spirited and patriotic heart" in the shape OF a
letter ''from a noble lady OF South Carolina"
This is the letter, and the whole of it,
81 believe speak the feeling of at least every
woman in South Carolina when L say we
heartily endorse your views, and each and
pubished letters We pray you to continue
your efforts to save us from such dishonor and
such degradation, to which the pain OF twenty
Heaven aid you in recalling the manhood OF
our State 10 a sense of what is due at least
their race"
twill be seen that there is not much in it.
In fact, there is nothing in it, except the
assertion of one woman of South Carolina that
all the other women agree with Governor
Perry in his tviews, :" and wish he would keep
on expressing them. Nevertheless, it is quite
evident that Mr. Perry believes that his stuff
may be made not only to do duty as an argu-
ment, but as a vindication of himself and his
later performances for, says he, ''such patri-
otto and spirited sentiments from one lovely
woman fully compensate me for all the criti-
cism and abuse which have been heaped upon
me-" Now, this little touch, revealing the
delight of middle-aged politician at having
some rather extravagant talk of his on most
momentous question approved in a rather silly
letter by Zone lovely woman, " is the kind of
thing which makes good and moderate men at
the North and elsewhere feel discouraged
about the future of the Southern whites.
With the best wish in the world to let
bygones be bygones, one is puzzled to know
how to deal with men to whom politics
is so much an affair of sentiment, and
so little an affair of hard common sense, as it
seems and has always seemed to be the bulk
OF the Southern planters. We suppose it
would be difficult to overestimate the extent
TO which they were seduced into ranting and
railing in defense of slavery by the picturesque
view of slave society, or the extent to which
they were seduced in going to war by the
notion that they were cavaliers" +" and that it
would be pretty to see Cavaliers" with long
hair on horseback fighting Puritans on foot
There can hardly be doubt that thousands
OF simpletons, old and young, were driven to
the field by thoroughly medieval sensitive
ness to feminine censure or applause. But ii
caps the climax to find grave, elderly man,
rubaV G,~l,4 :, Ill
argument in defense of submission for an in
definite period to military government by
quoting little outburst of admiration of him
self and his doings from Zone lovely woman"
When man discusses politics in this frame
OF mind, it is very difficult to know how to
take him or the community which he repre-
sents. The ordinary arguments used in poll
t1oal discussions are of little use in dealing
with them. There is no use in talking of
expediency to gentlemen who are striving to
win female smiles, and whom '1ovely women'
are exhorting ''to die twenty violent deaths"
sooner than follow the commonplace, sensible
course which you recommend them; and vet
expediency is, or ought to be, the weightiest
OF all considerations in politics There is no
earthly way of making reconstruction plea
SAINT to the South; there is no way of arrang-
ing the admission of negroes to political life
that will prevent its being a bitter pill to
nearly every Southern white. Nobody ex-
poets it to be pleasant; but then it is unavoid-
able. 1t has to be swallowed. The alterna-
tive of such Southerners as do not like it is
expatriation or suicide. To sit down as Gov
ernor Perry is doing, and whine and below
against it, with the "lovely women" at his
back, is not only not manly, it is silly.
We could understand Southern men seek
ing to avoid action under the Reconstruction
act, and especially in South Carolina where
the negroes are in the majority, if there was
the smallest chance that delay would change
the situation. 1t is true that the act pre-
scribes the retention of the Southern States
under military government until the qualified
majority choose to act; but, then, supposing
the other States act, as they are likely to do,
no sensible man can suppose that South Caro-
lima would be allowed by Congress to stay out
an the cold for an indefinite period. Nothing
can be surer than that, if the majority per-
sisted in refusing to bring her in, the minority
would be at last allowed to dOso The spectacle
of State governed permanently by a military
force is one which the people of the North
would not long endure.
But Mr.. Perry acknowledges now that the
majority in South Carolina is against him. He
says the negro votes in all districts except one
Outnumber the whites, and his only hope OF
defeating the convention lies, he confesses, in
the ignorance of the blacks. Many negroes
in the interior, he thinks, will not have heard
of the convention or know anything about it,
and others win vote with their employers.
But this is a defense which time, and a very
snort time, too, is sure to remove. Let the
convention be defeated now through negro
Ignorance or subserviencY and we may be
sure the radicals, both black and white. would
double their efforts to enlighten them, so that
An very lew months the issue would have tC
be tried over again, and the result would pro-
badly De very different. Mr.. Perry and his