The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-07-08

tor called upon to celebrate national ami
versary who was ashamed to speak of the
greatest and most fercelY contested battles in
our history.
Negro Voting and Negro Omce-HOIdIng.
From The World.
We admit that the qualifications to vote and
to hold Office do not in all points tally and
coincide. The same citizen who may vote
when he is twenty-one cannot be member
of Congress until he is twenty-five, nor a
Senator until he is thirty, nor President or
Vice-President until he is thirty-fve. A natu-
rallied citizen may vote all his life, but he
can never be President. He must have been
nine years voter before he can be a Senator,
But disabilities like these have no relation to
color. A negro, like a white man, would be
excluded from the Presidency if his age is
less than thirty-fve. A negro, the same as
white man, could never be President if born
out of the United States. But every argument
in favor of the negro's right to vote on the
same conditions that the white man votes, is
equally an argument for the negros right to
hold Office on the same conditions that the
white man holds Office. The argument is that
the rights of men have no relation to the
COlOT Ol Inelr ShluS, anu IudJ alLuOuBu men
may be excluded from the elective franchise
for pauperism, for participation in rebellion,
for lunacy, for felony, for alienism, for nom
residence, they cannot rightfully be excluded
for no other reason than the color of their
skins. All distinctions founded on color are
proclaimed by the Republican party to be un-
just and absurd-a doctrine which they must
either abandon, or accept its necessary conse-
quence, that negroes have an equal right with
white men to hold Office.
The Republicans in our Constitutional Con-
vention must therefore be consistent, and
open the door for negro governors, negro
mayors of cities, and negro occupants of
every grade of Office, State and municipal. 1t
is their great mission to erase the word white
from the vocabulary of politics The eligi-
bility of negroes to all public Offices will be a
harmless innovation in this State, their num-
bers being so small, and the antipathy to their
race SO strong, that their white fellow voters
are never likely to elect or even nominate
them. Their radical patrons wish to make
them voters, not to share the offices with
them, but to use them as tools for giving the
white radicals a monopoly of political power.
But in the South the boot will be worn upon
the ether leg. There, the voting negroes
instead of being an insignificant fraction of the
Republican party, will form the great bulk of
it. They will be a majority of ten to one in
every caucus, and their delegates will be
proportionally strong in every nominal
ing convention. They will say, and justly
say, "The Republican party have made us
voters merely to keep their leaders in Office,
and as their ascendancy in the country de-
pends upon our support, we will exact an
equivalent for our votes. AS the white Re-
publicans exclude our colored brethren from
office in all the Northern States, we will re-
dress the injustice by taking all the offices for
ourselves in the South, where we have the
power" This is a result on which the Repub
lican party may not yet have reflected, but it
is one which they cannot prevent. Equality
in ofice-holding follows as legitimately from
their principles as equality in voting. They
dare not confer the one and withhold the
other, lest the negroes, indignant at the in
consistency, should turn against them and
vote with the other party. The Republicans
are under a delusion if they suppose the
Southern negroes will give all the votes
and take none of the offices. A fat Office
is as valuable to negro as to a white
man, and will be coveted by him all the more
eagerly as a means of removing the badge of
interiority put upon him by his color. That
the negroes will vote themselves into office
wherever they have the power is as certain by
the principles of human nature as it is by the
law of gravity thataunsupported bodies will
fall to the earth. Black Governors and black
Legislatures in the Southern States, black
Senators and Representatives sent from those
States to Congress, will be the natural and
necessary fruit of a policy which confers the
ballot upon the negroes and organizes them
into party of which they will form a large
majority. 1t is equally certain that the
Southern whites will be restless and recalci-
trant under the insolent rule of their former
saves-a certainty that opens hideous vista
of bloody brawls and military domination at
which humanity stands aghast and patriotism
shuddeTs. These hideous consequences will
be the natural fruit of the radical policy of
forcino uaoro an ffrapa on the South