The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-04-10

1snI or secession, SucH as u may uo, lenged and unabridged. You said by Act of Congress that the black man should be a white man. You conhscated the debts and the money of the Confederacy But you left in the Constitution that la tai double construction to which. along with slavery. we owed all our trouble, and there 1t is today, and If I want to take Kentucky and go out of the Union, there is no statute to hinder me, and for me. youI cannot find the law to hang me for treason. beg that you will not be disturbed. am not going to do 1t.
 The Folly of Discrimination.
 know that there are many Northern statesmen, conscientious and learned. wno cannot assent to this view. They do not think 1t best to accept so light an esti- mate of what they regard as q great crime. But why not? Recalling Burke's aphorism touching his inability to draft though the subjects of a King-how may ten millions of free men be criminally arraigned by twenty millions Of their fellow citizens because of the conse- quences of an honest difference of consti- tutional construction. embracing some of the foremost Jurists. some of the purest patriots, From Josiah Quincy and John c. Calhoun to Alexander H. Stephens and Salmon P. Chase? Why should the North want to draw such an indictment of the South? The North won all. the South lost all No one of tho principals survive. Millions of staiwart Amerfcans have been born and have reached man last shot was fired in that conflict. Some of them serve in the Army and some of them in the Navy. Some of them 70 the length of describing themselves as Veterans of the Spanish War" All of of their country. Why should any thoughtful. patriotic American want to put blot upon the .arnily escutcheon Of these Americans? Why should any discriminate between any body of up- right and brave Americans. who did their duty as God gave them the light to see 1t? What good reason can any thought to establish an historic line, blacklisting the people of section, who met defeat so manfully and have taken upon them selves the renewed obligations of citi- zenship so Loyalty?
 After thirty years of observation, ex- perience and refiection-always directed from 8 sympathetic point of view-I am forced to agree with the Secretary of War that Negro Suffrage is failure. blacks are not equal to it. It is Q fail- use because the Southern whites will not have 1t.
 If, making a hot answer to this. some over-zealous. and. as l must think.  have the power. we have the numbers, and we will compel the whites of the South, my answer shall be, you did. and behold what came of it!" And throw up his hands in despair and with a kind of distrust turn wearily away, should contipue-s'may you not have been from the first upon the wrong track? Is there not another out let to these perplexities, another solu- ton of this problem? After all, is not your disquietude based upon the idea that there are one set of moral condi- tions at the North and another set at trouble tns eu s Believe me tSare is no such difference. Remove every white Democrat today living in t~s South and replace him with Northern Republican, and twelve months hence the conditions will be the same, may be worse. since the Northern Republican would not be likely to have either the patience, or the personal sympathy and knowiedse, possessed by the native s'o'Asrn's; The Only solution.
 Gentlemen, I appeal to you as Repub- licans. and through you I appeal to the Republicans of the United States, to have done with the conceit that, unless you continue him as an issue in partisan poli- tics, injustice will be done him. In the bettering of his condition. and in the ac- quisition of property, starting with noth- ing. he has made wondrous progress the last five and thirty years: and, relatively. greater progress at the South than at the North. He could not have done this without the sympathy and cooperation of the Southern whites. He has made lit- tie progress In the arts of self-govern- ment either North or South, because of the agitation which has kept him in state of perpetual excitement, with no healthful public opinion to moderate 1t. and has been made the sport and prey of political exigency. always selfish. and with respect to him more or less vision ary and needless.
 The negro can never become in any beneficient. or genuine sense, an integral and recognized part of the body polite except through the forces of evolution, which are undoubtedly at work. but which in the nature of the case must needs go exceedingly slow. Where there Is one negro fit for citizenship, there are myrlads of negroes wholly unfit. The hot-house process has been tried and it has failed. If. invested with every right enjoyed by the whites, the blacks. gain ing in all things else. have brought cor ruption into the suffrage and discredit upon themselves, Is 1t not kind of mad ness further to press artificial methods. from educational look-outs in Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, fall helpless to the ground in their practical application to the semi -barbarous toilers in the cotton hOluS dh0 Ol <AldbdAAldg 1COA- gia and South Carolina?
 I appeal to you equally in what I con- ceive the true interest of the black people along with the white people of the South: nay, and of the North as well, for all our interests are indissoluble, inter- changeable. and that can never be good or bad for one section which is<not good or bad for the other section. Modern invention, which has already annihilated time and space is surely erasing section- al lines. It ought not to have so much as a reminiscence of sectional strife. If that dread spirit should come again. it's evil winds will not blow between the North and the South, but between the East and the West; the horns of the dilemma presented by extremism inwolv- Ing a new irrepressible conflict between capital and labor. May that day never come, but in case 1t does the conserva- tism of the North will need the conser- vatism of the South. The law-lovng forces of the North will need the law breeding instincts of the South. The Americanism of the North will need the Americanism of the South. Then. indeed, shall both sections learn what racial means and know for cer- tain that blood is thicker than water.