Not lightly fall Beyond recall The written scrolls a breath can float: The crowning fact, The kingliest act Of freedom is the freeman's vote.
The too common practice in all portions of the Union honors vice and gives scant encouragement to noblest qualities. If a community bestow its rewards and honors on inferior or vicious men, higher qualities will decay and perish or seek other fields. If honors and rewards be allotted to the noble and the good, the demand will develop intelligence and nobility. In America there is lamentably a plentiful lack of great men. Whatever may be the demand, the supply is inadequate. Woe to the country, said Metternich, whose condition and institutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs. The country needs men of earnest convictions and noble aims, "to whom power is not a possession to be grasped, but a trust to be fulfilled." A nation can have no purer wealth than the stainless honor of its public men. The philosophic Macintosh enunciated almost a maxim when he said, "There can be no scheme or measure as beneficial to the State as the mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public advantage." By some, politics seems to be regarded as a game in which the sharpest are to win. Federal, State, or municipal government can never be safely committed to any party or men as the result of fraud or connivance at fraud.
Since the Federal Government dispensed with a period of probation as preparatory to suffrage, and refused to leave the whole question of suffrage to the States where it properly belongs, the presence of the negroes becomes to the South fearfully ominous of peril. Giving the right to vote to the ignorant and incapable is only a part of the evils associated with the inhabitancy of such a multitude of citizens of a different and inferior race. Such is the climate of the South, the fertility of soil, the ease of bare subsistence, that little labor and but scant clothing and shelter are needed by the negroes, with their thriftlessness, and without taste or desire for any large measure of artificial comforts, and with few incentives to patient industry. Their presence will prevent any early or large immigration of Europeans. The removal of the negroes is an obvious suggestion, but the policy pursued toward the Indians, undesirable, as coinhabitants, but as capable as negroes of free government, seems impracticable from want of territory for colonization and because of the large number of the negroes. This displacement at present may be impossible, and would certainly be tedious and expensive. Close contact of the two races becomes a necessity of this coöccupancy of territory. The Southern white people should cultivate kindliest feelings and make wise and strenuous efforts for the improvement of their former slaves. Already the whites bear the expense of educating the blacks. In the last six years the expenditure in Virginia for "colored schools" has amounted to near $1,668,000, and it would be safe to say that one and a half millions of this sum were paid by white citizens. So also we take care of their blind, and deaf, and dumb, and idiotic, pay for the trial and safe-keeping of their criminals, and bear the burdens of government. Impartial justice should be administered without reference to race, color, or previous condition; freedom and the right to hold and inherit property should be guaranteed; protection against all violence or wrong should be afforded; but there should be formed no party nor other affiliations which may tend to efface the line of social separation, or ignore the predestined distinction of color. The attempt in Africa to Europeanize the negro and ignore his idiosyncrasies as a race has utterly failed. The races here should be kept from abnormal admixture. Rigid laws, springing from and enforced by an inflexible public opinion, should prevent intermarriage. Miscegenation will degrade the Caucasian. Red and white deteriorate, _a fortiori_, white and black. The fusion would lower the white race in the scale of civilization, of moral and mental power, and would reproduce the ignorance, superstition, priestcraft, and chronic revolutions of Mexico with her mongrel population.