The bill passed and is a conspicuous part of the statutes of the present day. Thus, the federal authorities are powerless to protect the Negroes, while the election officers, judges, juries, returning-boards and all other legal machinery of the Southern States are in the hands of the Democrats. This leaves the freedmen without remedy and without hope as equal citizens of the United States, and so they must remain until the Republicans shall have effective majorities in both Houses of Congress.

If that time shall come, a little moral courage will suffice to make existing remedies effective.

The Constitution declares that "the United States shall guarantee to each State a republican form of government." This implies the existence of both the power and the means to carry that guaranty into effect. Congress is the sole judge of the means as well as of the occasion for their exercise.

If a State departs from a republican form of government, it falls under the control of Congress. That body may then transform it into a territory for the purpose of bringing it back to the forms if not the spirit of Republicanism; or, under certain circumstances, for the same purpose, the President may declare martial law within its borders.

The former course would certainly deprive the turbulent States of their representatives in Congress; and, once brought to that condition, they should be held in it until there seemed to be no doubt whatever that every citizen, black or white, Democrat or Republican, could go freely and unmolested to the polls, cast his ballot with equal freedom and be sure that its full effect would be recorded and felt in the general result.

But is it probable there is courage enough left in the Republican party to undertake anything like this? If Chancellor Bismarck should wantonly slaughter 12,000 of our pigs, or the wine-merchants of France should destroy 12,000 hampers of the American raw spirits used in making "fine French

wines," the Republic would soon be in an uproar, and Congress would fall to discussing war-measures.

If Congress shall take no action, and elections shall continue in the South as in the past, the poor blacks must seek other remedies. What may they be? (1)Either the Negroes must waive all their rights of citizenship and abstain from voting or taking any active part whatever in politics; or, (2) every colored voter in the South must be equipped with the best arms and ammunition of modern times for selfdefense.

We have seen how the general government has been so manacled by Democratic legislation that it can not protect the Negro while he is voting, nor his ballot after it has been cast; and the State election officers, being wholly in the hands of the Democrats, will permit no Republican, should he receive a majority of the votes at any election, to reap the fruits of his victory. Therefore, under the present circumstances, whether the blacks shall vote or abstain wholly from political action, the result will be the same to them, except that by maintaining absolute quiet they will escape the bludgeon and the bullet.

As to the second plan, if one is able to come to any conclusion from hypotheses in which all the facts are undisputed and notorious, he must believe that if every colored voter in the South were provided with the best Winchester repeating rifle, and 100 rounds of ammunition before each election, the reign of terror, fraud, intimidation and bloodshed would disappear as if by magic from that section.

If the Negroes were thus armed, Southern elections would be as peaceable as those of the North, for the Democrats would understand that if they should precipitate any violence, or shoot any Republicans, they would be met blow for blow and life for life.

Can it be worse for a colored Republican to go armed to the polls in order to cast his ballot than for white Democrats

to stand all day at the polls armed to prevent him from casting it?

It is idle hypocrisy for those Democrats who feel no pangs when a hundred Republican Negroes are shot like dogs during a single campaign, to affect expressions of horror at this proposition, for they know the blacks are never the aggressors, and that, when unmolested, they are as peaceable as even the best classes of whites. The acting Vice-President of the United States, standing on the reeking soil of Louisiana in May, 1873, declared boldly that whenever the freed-men were attacked, they should shoot and kill in selfdefense, adding:

* *

There is no war of races, of which I hear so much, in this suggestion. It is the innocent man defending himself against the wrong-doer. Talk to me about a war of races in the South by the aggressions of the colored man! You might have convinced me in the North of that, but you never can after what I have seen of the colored men themselves in Louisiana. I will believe that such a danger is to be apprehended when and not until you have satisfied me that the lambs on the farms in Wisconsin have banded together to devour the wolves in the forest.

Who believes the Negroes are the aggressors in such cases? Who believes the poor freedmen (knowing better than can ever be known in the North that a conflict between themselves and the white Democracy will have but one result) would deliberately bring on a struggle that could only end in their own slaughter? No well-informed, intelligent person pretends to believe it. It is not believable; it is not the fact.

The colored citizen of this Republic is the child and ward of the Republican party. There can be no dispute about that. If he shall be starved and neglected-physically, morally and politically-and finally abandoned by that party, we could not complain if we should see him taken in, cared for and put to service, if not formally adopted, by the Demo

crats.

Whoever is responsible for causes is responsible for consequences.

The Negro was bred and born like a bird in a cage. The Republicans took him from the cage, with no knowledge how to live out of it, and turned him loose without food, education, home, tools, land or understanding of individual responsibility, in the midst of a furious storm of prejudice and oppression and pursued by the most relentless foes that ever beset any human pathway.

Having done this, shall we not be held responsible at the bar of our own consciences and before the civilized world for the present condition, the numberless woes and the ultimate destiny of the freedman? There can be no escape from this conclusion.

If the Republican administrations are without power, and the Republican party as an organization is without the patriotism or desire to extend aid,encouragement, sympathy and protection to the colored citizens of the South, then individuals should act, as they did in the eventful days of Abolitionism.

At the coming election there does not deserve to be a single Democratic Congressman elected in the Northern States. The people who love Republicanism, freedom and fairness should rise as one man and vote the Republican ticket. Then the next Congress could take such steps as the deplorable condition of the South demands-refuse to admit representatives elected only by means of fraud and bloodshed; establish a system of education for the prostrate States, or proceed to give them a Republican form of government And, when such a course shall be entered upon, there should be no retreat or relaxation until civil equality and safety shall be as perfect and universal in the South as it now is in the North.

CHAPTER XXXV.

WHO CAN SUPPORT THE DEMOCRACY?

Foreign-born Citizens Should Be Republicans-Laborers Despised and Maligned by the Aristocratic Democrats-Sentiments of Some of Their Leaders-No Honest Irishman Can Be an Honest Democrat -Results of the Republican Free-Homestead Law-Soldiers Can Not Vote the Democratic Ticket and Keep Their Record Consistcnt-No Reason for Turning the Government Over to the Democracy.

All mankind has been, directly and indirectly, benefited by the achievements of the Republican party, yet, strange to say, the only class that has stood firmly by it, as a class, is the Negro race. Next to the blacks stand the Union soldiers of the late Rebellion.

In 1856, 1860, 1864 and, to some extent, in 1868, foreignborn citizens flocked around the Republican ticket because its nominees represented free labor. Laborers have never been poorly paid, nor farmers compelled to accept paltry returns from their lands since the Negroes of the South were set free and the government was taken in hand by the Republican party.

The slavery of the South saddled the free whites of the North with low wages and a certain degradation that would otherwise have been impossible. The Republican party wiped out the incubus of slave labor, but now many of our foreign-born citizens, forgetting the past, are voting the Democratic ticket.

Every farmer, laborer, scholar, manufacturer, professional man, Union soldier, artisan, patriot, naturalized citizen, colored man, young man, moralist and Christian-particularly