The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-09-10

taTiy Vafuaote 60 him. In Southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois the negroes generally this statement will not be controverted by any well informed. frank politician from either party In that section.
 The South today is governed exclusive iy by white mon, and SO far as my ob- servation goes. that section of the country IS cleaner in its politics than the North. Vote buying is not common. and the aver age scale of political morality in the cot ton States Is decidedly high.
 Why cannot we be honest, and admit at once publicly. as most of us do privately, that the granting of the suffrage to the negro immediately after the war was a terrible mistake?.
 The negro in the South is out of poli- ties now. Let him stay out a bit longer. It wili not hurt him in the least. On the contrary. 1t is only when he is out of poli- tics that he can hope to secure the sup port Of his white neighbors, without which his uplifting must be impossible. The ballot does not help the negro to get work or to educate his children. He is much too ignorant to apply the remedy of the suffrage to disperse the evils of his present condition.
 The manifest future of the negro race in America lies along the line of mental and industrial culture. Booker T. Washington Is right, and Professor Dubois and T. Thomas Fortune are dangerously wrong. The negro editors of the North who write infiammatory editorials which are circu- lated among the ignorant plantation hands are not the real friends of the black race.
 The negro in the South is not helped by being appointed to important political of- dce. The President of the United States Is much too honest. too brave and too re- sponsible to the people to be advised as to his actions. But 1t must be admitted that the negro in the South has been injured and not bettered by the recent attitude of the present administration. Indeed my personal observation tends to show that the status of the negro in the South was ,, far better and the relations between whites and blacks much more cordial dur ing the last year of President McKinley's administration than is the case today. What the negro in the South most needs today is not the ballot but the spelling book
 The South was despoiled by the war. It's | fields were desolated, its plantations ruined. it's capital dissipated and it's young men made old before their time through | the hardshps of soldering. Today the South is prospering. but 1t has no reserve | capital of it's own. In fact, it is just be- ginning to save. Its public funds are small. Its tax levies are necessarily meagre, but it's needs are great. To ask the South, unaided. to educate the negro Is cruel injustice. The negroes cannot educate themselves because they are hope lessly poor and pitifully ignorant. The solution is sufficiently obvious. | The national government should do the educating. Why is it not entirely feasible to stamp out illiteracy as one stamps out an epidemic of smallpox? Inoculate the whole negro race with the bacillus of edu- cation.
 The great rich. progressive. educated North should at last wake up to the real necessities of the negro question. If the black man in the South is ignorant, de- graded. immoral, improvident. and dense, 1t is the fault of the North, which struck the shackles from his feet and then left him to shift for himself, a hopeless found- ling in an unfriendly world.
 It Is quite feasible and it Is entirely legal for the nation to attack the terrible nit eracy of the South. and it should do So without regard either for the obsolete op- position of the Southern whites or for the ignorant indifference of the Southern blacks.
 | Meanwhile, let us suppress both the ne- gro editor and the Northern politician. The South needs more and better labor. The industrial and commercial develop. ment of that section cannot proceed with out a much more abundant labor supply and this can be obtained only through the encouragement of white immigration from Europe. Iron and coal will not come out of the ground of themselves, and the ne. gro population of the South is today who'll ly insufficient to till the fields. Foreign white labor will not go to the South until conditions there as to the treatment of labortng men are greatly bettered That can be done only by bettering the condi- tion of the negro himself. so that foreign white men will be content to work by his side.
 Lynchings. firmly believe. are ephem. eral episodes. so far as the great race question is concerned. An accurate record of all such outbreaks will show beyond peradventure that the great majority were not provoked by the crime of assault
 nor even for insults to white women. On the contrary. in four out of five cases
 noted in the newspapers it will be discov.
 cred that negroes are lynched for robber.
 les. arson attacks upon white men, snd even for mere threats. There are, unfor,
 tunately, too many cases of assaults upor
 white women and children by negro men
 but the number Is extremely small a!
 compared with the number of lynchings
 It Is also suspicious that whenever iynching party starts out on a search fol criminal 1t generally gets some mig ger,' as one of my informants put it. White men are not lynched in the South , What is more. white man who kills white man in the South is not ordinaril, . punished by process of law. This is sweeping statement but it is true. ant
 the files of Southern newspapers wil
 prove It.
 , The pistol carrying habit in the South fl
 disgrace to that community. It began among the whites. and has now been gen erally adopted by the negroes themselves The South ought to put stop to 1t a once. It should punish the carrying O concealed weapons with a term in tn, pententiary. and it should try and hanl murderers according to the law and thu evidence. whether they he white or black If that be done. and if the lynchings art f limited to the proved cases of outrageous attacks upon women. the necessity fo these illegal murders will soon disappear i Finally. let me reiterate the declaration , that the only permanent settlement of th' race question in America must como through the elevation of the negro. tha this must proceed from the ground III
 through the district school and no through the university. and that the peo pie of New York and of Illinois and o Oregon are quite as responsible for negrt illiteracy as the people of Georgia ant
 Arkansas.
 The uplifting of the negro must he done by the nation, and it must be done with
 out regard to the innate indifference ol the Southern negroes or the fatuous op position of the Southern whites.
 
 RADICAL CHANGES.