Evening times-Republican. [volume] (Marshalltown, Iowa) 1890-1923, 1903-04-10
NOT F|I FOR BALLOT
Henry Watterson Declares the
Negroes Are Not Yet Ready
For Suffrage
FAILURE IN SELF GOVERNMENT
Policy Pursued Towards the Negro Has
Been Such as to Bring Self Reliance
and Progress for the colored Race
Address Before Hamilton Club in
Chicago.

SUISdSOs y
Chicago, April 10.-"After thirty
years of observation, experience and
efiection-always directed from a SYM
pathetic point of view-I am forced to
agree with the secretary of war; that
negro suffrage is a failure. 1t is a fail
ure because the southern blacks are
not equal to 1t. 1t is failure because
the southern whites will not have it,"
Colonel Henry Watterson, editor OF
the Louisville Courier-Journal. in an
address at the thirteenth annual din
ner of the Hamilton Club of Chicago
in the auditorium last night, having
declared, as above quoted, his belief
that the acknowledgements of the col
ored man has proved failure, made
an eloquent plea ito the republicans
of the United States to use their in
fuence in removing the negro from par
tisan politics, and thus allow him to
SISlu LliIlSGll W tHe eNOlullOu VI GuUCd-
ton and gradual development.
Gentlemen, / appeal to you as re-
publicans, and thru you to the republic
cans of the United States" said the
editor, Ito have done with the conceit
that unless you stand by the black man
that unless you continue him as an is
sue in partisan politics. injustice will
be done him. He has made little pro-
gress in the arts of seif-government,
either north or south because OF the
agitation which has kept him in state
of perpetual excitement with no health
full public opinion to moderate it, and
has been made the sport and prey of
political exigency, always selfish. and
with respect to him more or less Wis
ionary and needless"
Five hundred members of the Ham
ilton Club greeted Colonel Watterson
with most sincere enthusiasm. He was
cheered time and again. On complet-
ing his address the banqueters jumped
to their feet, waved handkerchiefs and
INDUCED in shouts and hurrahs. His
subject was Peace Between the Sec
lions"
The speakers discussion of the negro
problem seemed to attract the deepest
attention.
1.-THE negro can never become in aben-
eficent or genuine sense an integral and
recognized part of the body polite ex-
cept thru 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 myr-
lads of negroes unfit. The dollhouse
process has been tried and it has fail
ed If, invested with every right en-
joyed by the whites, the blacks, gain
ing in all things else, have brought COR
rnption into the suffrage and discredit
upon themselves, is it not a kind of
madness to further press artificial
methods, which, however justified the
oretically, from educational ook-outs
in Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin, fall
helpless to the ground in their appli-
cation to the semi barbarous toilers in
the cotton fields and corn lands of Ala
bama, Georgia and South Carolina?"
Colonel Watterson referred to the
negro question as the fly in our oint-
ment." He said he had grown up to
regard the institution Of slavery "as a
evil" He declared: with
gray jacket on my back, / abated no
part of my adherence for it" Yet he
fully realized that "the negro could
not be suspended like Mohammed's
coffin in the neither air" He said he
recognized, too, that he must be a
free man in fact as we'll as in name"
II promptly accepted the three last
amendments to the constitution as the
treaty OF peace between the north and
the south, and went to work in good
faith to help carry them out"
Branching out<from the racial prob
lem, Colonel Watterson continued in
this manner:
Modern invention, which has al
ready annihilated time and space, is
surely erasfhgl sectional lines. 1t ought
not to leave so much as a Renaissance
of sectional strife.
IF that dread spirit should come
again, it's evil winds will not blow be-
tween the north and the south, but be-
tween the east and the west; the horns
of the dilemma presented by eXtremism
involving a new, irrepressible conflict
between capital and labor.
case it does, the conservatism of the
north will need the conservatism of the
south. The law-loving forces of the
north will need the w-breeding in
stincts of the south. The Americanism
of the north will need the Americanism
of the south. Then, indeed, shall both
sections learn what racial homogeneity
means and know for certain that blood
is thicker than water"
Colonel Watterson also spoke of "the
solid SOUTH saying sit is the fault of
the republican party, not of the white
people of the southern states that the
south is solidly democratic" He de-
clared that from the death of Lincoln
to the advent of Mckinley the repub-
lican party threw out no friendy signal
to the whites of the south" He said:
ut was known to the south only thru
its reconstruction measures. mainly re-
rressive and hostile, and it's local
agents, generally extreme, too often
unclean, employing the negro vote as a
simple assent in congress, in repub-
lican national conventions and in the
field of the federal patronage"
Roosevelt "Rebel."
Colonel Watterson had this to say of
President Roosevelt: The chief mag
istrate of the United States is half a
southerner and all a rebel; God bless
him and may the Lord keep him in the
path of wisdom and virtue"
In another place the speaker said:
you said by act of congress that the
black man should be white man. You
confiscated the debts and the money of