THE RACE PROBLEM AT THE SOUTH 271 



union men, was to prevent abolition speeches because they 

 saw in them disunion or civil war, or it might be both civil war 

 and disunion. The civil war came; it was terrible — more ter- 

 rible than dreamer ever dreamed of. But it is over, and there 

 will never be disunion ; no one fears it now, because now no one 

 desires it. Slavery is dead, and can never be resurrected. So, 

 therefore, there is now nothing to hinder free speech in our 

 country about the race problem in the south. If in 1861 

 there was dynamite in the negro question, so when that dyna- 

 mite had exploded, and when states had been wrecked and 

 social and economic systems shattered, the problems that 

 grew out of the negro question were quite as exciting when up 

 for discussion as had been slavery itself. 



The most acute form in which this many-sided question 

 then presented itself was suffrage, and every student now 

 knows that political science played no part in its solution, that 

 the reconstruction acts were passed and the fifteenth amend- 

 ment was adopted when party spirit was more intolerant than 

 it had ever been before, and the passions of war were still blaz- 

 ing fiercely. The constitution of the fathers was framed in 

 Philadelphia after mature deliberation behind closed doors. 

 The fifteenth amendment, changing that instrument funda- 

 mentally, was formulated after heated debate in congress, on 

 the rostrimi, and in the newspapers throughout the land. In 

 debating the question of granting suffrage by law to millions 

 of ex-slaves, and then of cHnching the right by a constitutional 

 provision intended to secure it forever, whether it worked for 

 good or evil, the fundamental proposition for consideration 

 should have been the fitness of the negro. Was he intellec- 

 tually, by training and antecedents, competent to take part — 

 often a controlling part — in the great business of government? 

 But the case did not turn on that point, the discussion was 

 always wide of that mark. The nearest approach to the 

 question of the fitness of the ex-slave for the ballot was this 

 argument : Did not the government free the negro? Was he 

 not the ward of the nation? Did not the government owe 

 him protection? And how could he protect himself without 

 the ballot? 



This, though fitness was assumed without argument to 



