The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-08-29

Two present rival aspirants for the presidency of the United States have been long and abundant in official honors as devoted disciples of that political party which overthrow the state government of the south.
 The demonstrated exigencies of the cam paign of MT. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the two candidates indicated. have com pelled him to adopt the proposition of the existing constitution of Alabama. as re- Iates to negro suffrage. The constitution of this state Is successful attempt to overcome the legislation of Congress of 1861, known as the reconstruction acts. But party emergency still operate to force, MT. Roosevelt's former ally and his pres ent opponent to accept the issue of negro suffrage. While it may not be possible to conceive that civilized state can ever place itself in a posture of transition to. negro political control or negro political influence, on a test of judgment and con science, we have seen more than one pow erful state at the north so blinded by partisan zeal as to lift the negro up, by sudden act of enfranchisement, to the at- ttude of balance of power in it's electo- rate.
 Open the standard encyclopedia of the period in the south and compare the con tents with the encyclopedia of this year, 1912, when Candidate Roosevelt, by neces- sity, incorporates the negro suffrage pro- yiso of the Alabama constitution of 1901 into his platform. Evidently the white and black races of the United States are separated by a wider margin of race at titude toward government, and the aims and ends of government than they have been at any time for a century in the past.
 Nothing of the negro appears in the new encyclopedias to justify the proposi- tion of race equality, set forth in the civil rights act of Congress, enacted in February, 1866, and the reconstruction acts of the year 1867, and the act of 1868, which we are about to see fixed upon alabama an alien system of government Granted that Booker Washington maintains with great honor to himself vast school for negroes, fed to prcdigality unparalleled by the benefactions of the rich of the north, granted that the negroes of Georgia have acquired in their release from slavery millions of acres of the farm lands they opened from the forest in slavery. We come to the limit of negro advancement, intellectual and moral, when we reach the limit of the capacity of the race to imi- tate the conquests of the white mans mind over the material world The white man only ,and not the black man at all, caused the acre, cultivated by the negro tenant farmer last year, with a yield of 10 bushels of corn, to make this year under his own methods loo bushels. The pork hog that the negro slaughters to yield 100 pounds of meat brings to the white farmer 200 pounds. The electric cur hot 100 miles in an instant of time, moves ma chinery, makes farm fertilizer from the air, transports passengers for 1000 miles, the aeroplane, the automobile, the turn pike, the painless method of dentistry and so on are items in the count going to widen year by year the intellectual and moral margin that separates the races.
 A very unconscious but apt interpreta- tion of the native character of --.e three races, red. white and black that lived in close contact with each otherl in the south, in the time of men yet 1iving is given by the French political writer. De Tocqueville. The traveller walked through the forest settlements of Georgia. He spied In the distance three children seat ed together on a brook to whom his presence was unsuspected. He prolonged his silent observation to study the three examples of white red and black races before him. The white child discovered the dominating disposition over the others. the direct effect of white mastery over slaves, adJudged the anti-slavery observer. The red child displayed the stolid in- difference bred into his race by the ig- norance of ages and the solitude of the forest The black child was subdued and subservient in department. the manifesto ton of race slavery. An observer better informed than monsieur would have dis covered before him in the virgin forest the