The age-herald., 1901-03-31

with sharp rocks and fish bones,'
 Do your people wear covering of any | kind on their bodies?'
 No, none except @ strip of calico or | some such goods when we happen to trade with ship masters or missionaries | for it."
 Do your people cook food and do you I have regular meals?"
 Don't cook anything; eat every man for himself when he finds root or berry, or snake or worm. Sometimes every | body goes two or three days without | finding anything to eat. If baby comes that is not jet black we eat the baby. i Sometimes we eat prisoners we catch in war"
 "Is there a law of marriage or custom of pairing off between sexes in your | tribe?"
 There is not any marriage law and | only a little pairing off. Children don't have but one parent that they know and | that Is the mother"
 Has your tribe any reIigion?" None but worship of the idols we buy from the ships, copper or plaster images l and such things"
 Has your tribe any alphabet and fixed language?'
 No alphabet and only few words"
 
 Our new constitution must and will give the negro of the State good govern ment. We may stuff him with Barnes School History, Peterman's Civil Govern ment, Whittier, Emerson and make no progress in educating him. The powers of nature within him have not generated education in that line We cannot pump into solid another solid, however mer- itorious in itself each solid may be. We can make a valuable component of so- ciety by action of comprehensive organic law. but we may fail to create a citizen by any process of law whatsoever. If we go to MT. Hoar. Mr. Tom Platt, MT. William Mckinley to teach us the course we should follow toward the negro here, we shall not make an organic law for Alabama society, but political swindle for the use of the Republican party. | Wonderful negro of the South! A dozen years ago Senator Morgan cried out, De port him to the free State of Congo" The Senator gave up the cry! The negro has made cotton opened mines, built rail- roads and towns In Alabama in all these years that our Senator has ceased to de- port him to Congo. Again our Senator i lifts his voice. 'Deport him to the Phil 1 ippines!' Our contractors and farmers know better than the Senator's teaching. Negroes are at work here in Alabama. l Wonderful negro of the South! Every device of powerful government to cr1p- pie him and loosen his hold on life has failed gnomniously. When the negro was in bondage his labor sent out cotton, so much In excess of the capacity of Now England to manufacture it that England had to take three-fourths of the crop across the seas to Manchester. Negro labor in bondage produced rice. tobacco, sugar and cotton to export to foreign lands to the grand aggregate of slSS, ,69S. 496, in the fiscal year of 1859. While the total of all exports except California gold from the free states. produced there, was the paltry value of s, 2S1,091 We had no source of federal revenue then but the tariff tax on imports that came In to l pay for the exports Who paid the tariff tax? Negro labor. of course. Coming to this time of freedom it is said Alabama pays three and a half mil | lions annually on pensions to the East and West Imagine two years of exemp- tion from this gratuity. then we would have ample money to give Mobile Bay a thirty-foot channel and to open the War rior and Bigbee as arms of the sea- Im- agine five years exemption from the pen- sion tax; the money would open the Ten nessee and the Coosa and cut the canal from Gadsden to Guntersville besides,
 
 constitutional principle of government now denied to the negro and all concerned in Alabama.
 The Republican party is founded upon the dogma of opportunism, that there is a higher law than the constitution. The ''higher law" is this thing today and the other thing tomorrow, A constitution must be made, if made at all, on the dem ocratic doctrine of equal rights for all and special privileges for none, A con- situation must organize the negro element upon that general principle of equity be- tween two occupant races, All aentimen- tai effort to create g race status repulsive to the law of God Is crime in the law of human conduct,
 Alabama lays great work before us, Let us aauit ourselves like men.
 His Strenuous" Voice,
 From the Buffalo Commercial,