The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-06-19

injustice wherever or whenever found. The first public act of my life was a formal protest against the torture and burning of negro. I have not only pleaded for his education, but l have publicly and repeatedly protested against any suffrage test that should not bear evenly and Justly upon both races. Such course has involved neither eceentricity nor martyrdom. Pardon the personal ele- ment in such statements. They might be made with equal truth of tens of thou sands of others. Such men have often been in a minority. But this minority has existed, and 1t has been free; free to think, free to speak, free to act. And it has acted.
 In reference, however. to the ''pecna ge'' cases in Alabama, 1t would be reflection upon my State for me to say that the cause of humanity is the cause of mi nority." It Is the cause of an overwhelm- ing majority. That the cases have now been taken up from the obscure locali- ties in the rural counties of Alabama and have been brought to the more efficient jurisdiction of a great and just pudge in Federal Court, has been a matter for general congratulation. The people of Alabama are as one in their cssre first to get at the facts and then to get at the guilty.
 I regret, however, that the existence of
 peonage cases in Alabama should seem to prove to The Evening Post the futil- ity of letting the South alone!' If the South had ever been let alone, this req soning might be good.
 In so far as ''peonage" exists. the sys- tenn has grown up as one of the inciden- tai results of not letting the South alone: 1t has come into its baleful existence through period in which a persistent policy of intrusive censure and of polit- ical threatenings from without has borne with its narrowing pressure upon South ern life. putting the South ever on the defensive and partly neutralizlng the forces of self-criticism and of local re- sponsibility. Whatever evils may now ex. ist at the South have not resulted from the policy of letting the South alone. That policy has hardly been tried.
 We find perhaps the first tentative ap- proach toward the trial of such a policy Of Alabama, Democrat and Southerner, and one of tine bravest and justest spirits in our whole country. as Federal Judge for the Middle and Northern Districts of Alabama. It Is a fact of profound and intimate significance that 1t is in this mans court (although Federal Courts have been operating in alabama for a generationl. that the victims of the ''peon- age" abuse are now likely to find redress
 The growing disposition of the North to let the South alone, to say hands off'' and to forego for the present the applica- tion of constitutional penalties (however just these penalties may be in theory) will be met by an alert and growing de- termination upon the part of the men of the South to face their local problems. to say hands on," to deal constructively with those interests of right which must concern the South quite as much as they concern either the negro or the North. If the task Is ever to be done permanently we must do 1t. We shall never do it quite so well as we might do it, so long as there is operative at the North a disposi- tlon of moral fretfulness and of academic fussiness, which. forgetting our burdens and exaggerating our failures. Is always present to tempt the weak to cynicism and the just to strong language.
 I would preach no gospel of sectional isolation or of provincial self-sufftciency. The South welcomes the growing evidence of wholesome national interest and of a larger national cooperation. But the assumption that conscience is dead among us and that courage is silent, that the South is still to be judged in Emersons s inaccurate phrase of fifty years ago, that our public men and our courts of justice are wholly cowed by the prejudices of the mob, that press and bar and pulpit are yielding the protection of a cowardly si lence to a sordid and wretched trafic in defenseless human beings-such an as- sumption represents, fear, neither a just interest nor a broad cooperation. but the ancient animus of that era In New Eng land which was really contemporary with slavery in Alabama. Each today is out of place. Each may represent the phase of a momentary movement. a passing as pect of a single eddy in the larger cur rent. But the stream of our country's life North and South, has rolled on. In the United States of America 1t Is little late to safely hold any human being in slavery. It is also a little late to charge slave holding, or compile ity with slove holding, upon whole peo- pie.
 Edgar Gardner Murphy.
 Montgomery Ala, June g.