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[337] Morton, was made by Morton. * * * ‘You cannot find,’ said the orator, ‘the most ardent anti-slavery man in Wayne county who will go and locate in a State that has a colored government.’ * * * ‘If you do this,’ he continued, ‘these States will remain permanently colored States. The white men who are now there will move away. They will not remain under such a dominion. In such case the colored States will be a balance of power in this country. * * * Finally, they will bring about a war of races.’ What has been the upshot of free government in Haiti? A cutlass in the hand of a babe. Within the past few years Mr. Charles Francis Adams has made known what was for himself ‘a reflex light from Africa.’ In the negro's native continent, he says, ‘the scales fell from my eyes. * * * We have actually wallowed in a bog of self-sufficient ignorance. * * * Upon the sheerest of delusions, due to pure ignorance, we built in reconstruction days as upon a foundation stone.’ Only the other day Viscount Morley, secretary of India, announced that democracy was as unsuited to Indian temperament as a Canadian fur coat to the Indian climate. Filipino students take first prizes at our law schools, but for the present, with due precaution for human rights, ‘benevolent assimilation’ can see no way to bestow the boom of self-government upon them. What then was the bestowal of the boon on the black race of the South? Was that malevolent assimilation? To the South was said: ‘It shall be your glory to make a pathway over the impassable.’ This which, in time of peace, the ‘free States’ of the North with such contumelious scorn had rejected for themselves-this, the South, when worn by ‘attrition to the bone,’ like Prussia after the battle of Jena, ‘a bleeding and lacerated mass,’ was blithely called on to perform. How are we to explain votes for this enfranchisement on the part of States which, so long as their own interests only were involved so unreservedly had voted otherwise? It was a change sudden as that which, on the road to Damascus changed Saul into Paul. The fabalist Aesop——whose sententious wisdom outweighs whole ‘volumes vast’ called history just because the so-called fable condenses into single instances the experience of all. so as to be co-operant with all—tells of two men, let us call them and B, to whom Jupiter agreed to grant whatever wish they
Richmond, VA. 1908.
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