LETTER FROM EDITOR EVENING POST TO MR. SHEPARD

Dear Sir: It is frequently alleged in the Southern press that leading Northern Democrats are in sympathy with the effort to disfranchise the negro in the South, under color of laws unequally enforced as between whites and blacks. To test the truth of this assertion, the Evening Post respectfully asks you to give it for publication your opinion upon the following statement of facts:

In the case (I8.72I) of Jackson W. Giles, appellant, vs. the Board of Registrars of Montgomery County, Alabama, argued before the United States Supreme Court at the October term of I902, it was shown that the said Board of Registrars refused to register qualified negroes "for no other reason than their race or color." The brief for the appellant specified that "more than 5,000 colored persons" in Montgomery County alone are thus excluded from the suffrage, though "qualified under the law of the State of Alabama and of the United States."

Granting the truth of these statements, and failing intervention by the Supreme Court,

(1.) Has Congress any duty in the premises?

(2.) If the Constitutional guaranties and penalties provided for such a case are allowed to lapse, what other can we count upon remaining in vigor?

(3.) If the negro may be deprived of the suffrage in the South, how long will it be before the same argument will be adduced, as Mr. Dos Passos, of the New york bar, admits that it may be, for the disfranchisement of the foreignborn voters in the North who are the peculiar strength of the Democratic party?

By answering these questions at your earliest convenience, you will greatly oblige. Yours very truly,

EDITOR OF THE EVENING POST.

LETTER FROM MR. SHEPARD TO THE EVENING POST OF AUGUST 26, 1903.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EVENING POST:SIR:--I cannot briefly answer your three questions upon negro suffrage, predicated upon the Giles case. If I am not--upon this large and difficult question--to be misunderstood, I must write at length. I do not "grant the truth" of unproved statements made by a complaint in equity of which neither the court in which the suit was brought nor the Supreme Court, to which it was appealed, had jurisdiction. The courts required no answer to the complaint and refused to take evidence upon it--holding that it was judicially immaterial whether the statements of the bill were true of false-- since even if they were true, the courts could give no relief to the colored plaintiff. In this conclusion the report indicates that all the Judges of the Supreme Court concurred, except Judge Brewer and possibly Judge Brown. Even Judge Harlan, who expressed his merely personal opinion that in a proper suit the colored citizen might have had relief, declared that in the only suit which he did bring the court could not help him.

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Nor do I accept the suggestion that the Southern press ascribes to Northern Democrats "sympathy with the effort to disfranchise the negro in the South under color of laws unequally enforced as between whites and blacks." Have you correctly understood the Southern press? Has it not been interested over the condemnation of negro suffrage by Secretary Root, Dr. Lyman Abbott, and other distinguished Republicans? Might not your questions be more properly addressed to members of the party now in power? Is not their opinion, for the time, of more consequence than that of Democrats? The Supreme Court, speaking by Judge Holmes, while itself refusing the colored voter any relief, significantly said that if there had been the political wrong he charged, then the relief, apart from mere money damages (confessedly no adequate reparation) must be given by the people of his State or by the "legislative and political department of the Government of the United States." President Roosevelt is at the head of such department; and of his position he is amply conscious. He talks of a "square deal" to negro citizens. He thinks that the importance of their recognition justifies the demoralization of the public service at the South by negro appointments which are personally offensive to nine-tenths of those having business with the offices; and this, while he refuses at the North to appoint 00053negroes to places of like relative importance. It is the duty of the President to execute existing laws. Does he think that there are laws assuring negro suffrage which are not, but which can be enforced? It is his Constitutional duty to recommend new laws when old laws fail. Does he recommend any such new laws? If so, what are they? And why has he not recommended them before, and why did not President McKinley recommend them? And why, I wonder, were not your questions addressed to the Republican President or the Republican Congress or Republican statesmen after an unsatisfactory answer by the Republican Supreme Court? The Republican party has been continuously in power since March, 1897, and has perfectly known the Southern situation. It has neither done nor suggested the doing of anything to right the wrong, if wrong there be. And why not?

I decline to assume with you that the Supreme Court was wrong in the Giles case; or that if, as you seem to imply, "Constitutional guaranties and penalties . . . are allowed to lapse," that is to say, allowed by the refusal of courts, Presidents, Congresses, and public sentiment to enforce them--it is useful to enact other guaranties and penalties, the efficacy of which equally depend upon courts, Presidents, Congresses, and public sentiment, and which, therefore, would be equally futile with those 00064at present existing. So also I decline to assume that "foreign-born voters at the North . . . are the peculiar strength of the Democratic party."

I prefer, however, to deal with the substance of the topic of which you would provoke discussion. I believe profoundly in democratic self-government; and I make no exception against negroes or Filipinos or any other race or country which has shown any capacity for any degree of orderly administration. I have always hated, and I hate now more than ever, human slavery, whether of white men or black or yellow or brown. I abhor the suggestion recently made by a distinguished Northern clergyman and approved by a distinguished Northern newspaper which has warmly supported President Roosevelt, that a system of governmental compulsory labor should be imposed upon the negroes at the South as upon an inferior race. I abhor peonage and would have every enginery of our governments, State and Federal, applied to punish and prevent it. I honor the citizens of Alabama who, as prosecutors, judges, and jurors, have punished it in that State, and the great majority of white citizens there who have supported them in their execution of the law. In my opinion, there rests upon the President no duty more imperative that to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment and the legislation enacted under it. For the amendment can be practically enforced. 00075Not only is it supported by the teachings of the noble men and women who convinced the American people of the crime of slavery and by the reverence in which we hold them, but by the national conscience enlightened during the dreadful war with which God punished the nation for the wrong--a national conscience dominant in the public sentiment of white men, South and North. I believe in the future growth of the intelligence and strength of character of the American negro. I consider his progress, industrial, intellectual and moral, to be vastly creditable to him and full of promise. I admire, and am grateful for the labors of that very true American patriot, Booker T. Washington, and of his colored associates. It is not difficult for me to enter into the feelings of men like Professor Du Bois. I should rejoice to see everywhere accorded to negro intelligence and industry and character the very same esteem and security in person and property which would be accorded the same faculties under a white skin. I believe it to be wise for Southern white men, and to their true interest, to cheerfully accord the ballot to the negroes who achieve industrial success and are intelligent and men of high character. All this and more like it I can say.

None the less, I should regard it as calamitous to the American nation, and, above all, calamitous to 00086the American negro, if the North were to undertake, through the Federal Government, to enforce upon the South the right of the negro to vote, or to make a political issue of that right. The undertaking means the use of physical force. Can anything be plainer that this? In the Giles case the Supreme Court declared that it would not enforce the right, because the physical ability of courts was insufficient. The condition of public sentiment being what it is at the South, the court would have to enter every election district and undertake the supervision of every election. Nor is this more than saying that judicial writs are futile to compel the white race in South Carolina or Mississippi to turn over the government of themselves and their State to the black race. No power less or other than an army from the North can make headway with such an undertaking. Only under military law could it attain even a nominal success, if even that be attainable. Our generation remembers that a Northern army did establish and maintain in the South "car-pet-bag" governments, with their infamies and lapses towards barbarism. If another Northern army were to renew the undertaking, we should have the same result.

For the practical problem, it is plain to the last degree, is not sheerly or chiefly one of maintaining or defeating democratic self-government. I would, 00097if I could, have blacks govern themselves. Therefore it is that I hate the Imperialistic scheme carried out by the Republican party in the Philippines. But in commonwealths where whites and blacks, although races profoundly distinct from one another, nevertheless live together, I should be sorry indeed to have the Government controlled by the blacks. The whites of no Northern State would voluntarily submit to negro government. Even if negroes be in a majority, is it not idle to expect Southern States in this respect to do what Northern States would not? If in Southern States the refusal of white men to be governed by black men means that black men are to be governed by white men and against the consent of the black men, I dislike the result as a calamity to both races, perhaps the worst of all the calamities born of the iniquitous slave trade. Whatever, however, be our grief at difficulties or inconsistencies, whatever be their practical evils, it is idle to ignore the vast racial difference between whites and blacks, or the vast superiority of the white race. So it is idle to discuss whether white superiority be essentially and permanently inborn, or whether it represents achievements of relatively short time which the black race may likewise, and in as short a time, accomplish. In spite of many exceptions honorable to the black race, and dishonorable to the white race, the fact of 00108the racial difference and of the white superiority is, for our generation and for generations to come, open to no doubt whatever. These exceptions do not make the rule. The really great relative progress of the negro since his escape from slavery does not alter the fact.

The problem in the South is unique. There we have two races dwelling together in closest industrial relation, city and country alike--races not far from numerically equal--races of which one on the average is very superior to the other, but, nevertheless, both races entitled and subject to a legal theory of perfect and democratic political equality. No like problem exists in any Northern State or in any important community of which I know. If, on the one hand, negroes be systematically excluded from the franchise while white men of like qualifications are admitted, then clearly the white man rules the negro without the latter's consent, and the foundation doctrine of the Declaration of Independence and of American Government and the express law of the land are violated. Such a result is lamentable and demoralizing, like many another inconsistency or anomaly. If, on the other hand, there be no such exclusion of negroes from suffrage, then in some States, at least, negroes will rule white men, with the result that, so long as the conditions of negro life are what they now are at the South and what they must for generations remain--civilization itself 00119will be undermined and decay. The rule would inevitably be what it was in corrupt carpet-bag days--a rule of adventurers and demagogues kept in power by ignorance, unspeakably disastrous to white and black alike.

As between violation of American doctrine and law and surrender of civilization, the Southern States with large negro populations have seized the horn of the dilemma which the whites of any and every Northern State would in like situation seize. The Southern whites stand for civilization as against political theory of legal right. And so they will stand. Nor do I believe that the North will effectively find fault. For the only effective faultfinding would be the enactment and execution of a force law such as has been nowhere more severely condemned than on the editorial pages of the Evening Post. Nor will President Roosevelt or his party go further in faultfinding than they deem useful to their hold upon negro delegates from the South or negro voters at the North. Doubtless, in some of the Northern States whose political divisions are nearly even, the negro voter is important to the Republican party. But even there I venture to point out that, with rare exceptions, negro delegates are as effectively excluded from Republican conventions and from the tickets proposed by the Republicans at the polls, as they are from the franchise in any Southern 001210State. The Republican Administration boisterously upholds the refusal of political rights to darkskinned men in Asiatic islands who would, if they enjoyed such rights, rule themselves to a result of solid though slow progress to their own higher civilization, and, while so ruling themselves, would not rule white men to the prostration of Caucasian civilization. Is it not an audacious inconsistency with which this very Administration preaches a contrary doctrine for Southern States, and only for those from which they do not hope for a single electoral vote? Nor do I believe that the Republican party will responsibly and sincerely propose a single practical remedy for the Southern difficulty. The more practical such a remedy the more forcible it would have to be, and the more forcible it should be the more its proposal would receive at the North and South the condemnation of patriotic men. The Republican party well knows that the nation would reject any effort to re- establish conditions of civil war in several States now in profound peace, enjoying a career of industrial prosperity; nor will that party ask the verdict of Northern sentiment upon this question.

In answer to your first question, I declare unreservedly against Congressional action to enforce negro suffrage in the Southern States.

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To your third question, I answer that there is not the slightest danger that foreign-born voters at the North will be prejudiced by the failure of negro voting at the South. Is it not astonishing that able and high-minded men do not perceive the absence of likeness between the two cases? Foreign-born voters at the North soon become, if they have not already become, an integral part of the whole white population. The white immigrant soon shares the instincts and prejudices of the native white; he worships in the same churches; he is a member of the same unions, and orders and lodges. He socially mingles with white natives, subject only to the limitations imposed by tastes, habits of life, fortune, creed, business, and the other categories which determine the social relations of citizens of pure white American descent. The second generation of white European immigrants is generally indistinguishable in appearance or speech from the descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims. The third generation is completely part of the American race. How radically different the relations between whites and negroes. The two races have lived together in South Carolina for two centuries and a half. But they remain to-day separate and distinct. It is the wisdom and the aspiration of the noble and intelligent men of the black race, no less than the intense and profound instinct 001412of the white race, that the two races must not, for the safety of both, fuse in sex or family relations.

And now for the second question. If Constitutional guaranties or penalties fail to induce--and will not be used by courts and congresses and Presidents to compel--the dominant white race to enfranchise the blacks in States where the latter are in a majority, or so numerous as with a relatively small white minority to make a majority--then upon what other guaranties and penalties can we count to secure political rights to the blacks? To this, I answer that we shall count upon the wisdom of white men and black men. We shall count upon the progress of black men in industrial intelligence, thrift, and wealth. We shall count upon the influence and stimulus of their own high-minded leaders. Those leaders see with heaven- directed wisdom that it is not the ballot which gives strength, but rather strength which brings the ballot. Negro conventions of late are much more full of encouragement than is your catechism. The carpet-bag government of blacks, however great their majorities, fell when the bayonets of Northern white men were withdrawn. The plain reason was that the black men lately in slavery and having ages or [??] of Africa instead of western Europe behind their slavery, were inferior in the skill, industry, intelligence, self- restraint which make the strength of white 001513men. Black men are, however, acquiring thrift, intelligence, well-ordered industry, property, and with these they will acquire strength in their relations with all men, white and black. If the progress must be long--so has white progress been long. The black man cannot justly repine if to compel the average white man to respect the abilities and virtues of his race it shall take as long as it took to convert the typical Anglo-Saxon hind who tilled the soil a thousand years ago in practical slavery to become the typical American or English mechanic or farmer of the twentieth century. Nor ought he to repine if it shall take much longer. As strength and ability come to black men, industrial success will come to them--and in this industrial republic that success will command the deference of white men. The dollar of the black man will come in time--and no long time--to have the power of a white man's dollar. With patience and tact white men will, I believe, at the South as at the North, come to wish that the black man whom he respects for thrift or ability or property shall vote, and to take care that his voting is not obstructed.

So it is that we may count upon the white man--upon his enlightened self-interest. And we may more safely count upon him if we recognize the fact that, whether we will or not, this problem is to be solved by the dominant race at the South. With 001614its control of the solution nothing but civil war can interfere; and over this we shall not have civil war. Lately I ventured in Alabama--and what I said was most hospitably received-- to present this truth. I pointed out the enormous interest which the Gulf States had in the industrial progress of the negro. One-half or more of their labor is negro labor. The productivity of those States, their progress in wealth, the success of the white man in using their natural resources, the white man's fortune and power--all these must in large part depend upon the industrial productivity of the negro. That productivity will in the long run, with blacks as with whites, depend upon the confidence of the laboring masses in the justice of their neighbors and of the law under which they live. It will depend upon the laborer's hopefulness and buoyancy, and the energy and resolute self-denial they create in him. And the laborer's hopeful buoyancy depends upon his belief that, if he do well, he will be important and respected. This instinct exists in both races. So it is that the interest of the Southern white man, his own industrial success, the peace and security of his country and his home, all are inevitably wrapt up in his treatment of the negro. The white man will,--in fact, ordered as the world is, he must--assure to the negro, as the latter progresses in thrift and ability and self-command, a larger recognition. This 001715will, I trust and believe, come to mean a strictly equal administration of property and intelligence--qualifications for suffrage like those prescribed by the new Alabama Constitution. The black with property or able to demonstrate his intelligence will vote, and will be aided by dominant white sentiment to compel the acceptance of his vote.

So it is that we may count in the solution of the negro suffrage question upon the inspired labors of the Southern and Northern men, men black and men white, who for the present preach to the Southern negroes industrial progress.

These seem long remedies; and they are long. But they are sure remedies; and there are no other. The ballot has never yet effectively gone to bodies of men who have not, without the ballot, already demonstrated their strength, material and moral. Of this the suffrage agitations in England offer sufficient proof. So it was demonstrated when the white minority in South Carolina took from the black majority a quarter century ago the political power asserted for them by the entire power of the nation.

I venture to ignore the plan to reduce Southern representation. It would not enfranchise a single black man; it would practically extinguish the hopes of the blacks; it would be futile to any good end; it would be a dangerous source of sectional 001816irritation and jealousy. It would separate black interests from white--a separation calamitous to both, while they live together, but far more calamitous to the weaker race; a separation fatal, indeed, to the beneficent and hopeful future now opening to the American negro.

EDWARD M. SHEPARD.Lake George, N.Y., August 26, 1903.

EDITORIAL OF EVENING POST OF AUGUST 28, 1903 THE CASTE NOTION OF SUFFRAGE

Southern newspapers have persuaded themselves that the raising of the question of the negro's political rights may elect a Democratic President. Thus the New Orleans Daily States declares that the Republican managers are "afraid of the race question." On the other hand, the Macon Telegraph represents the Democratic leaders as eager to make it the main issue. "A campaign on this issue in the North would at least win enough Republican votes in the doubtful States to offset the vote of the negroes." More telling, however, than any such vague forecasts is the revelation which the Evening Post is able to make to-day of the real attitude of Northern Democrats. If they are so hot to take up the issue of discriminating, by suffrage laws, against educated and property-owning negroes, it is somewhat surprising that more of them are not willing to say so. The astonishing silence which a direct question has produced in men ordinarily voluble is of great political significance.

The truth is, of course, that the issue of equality before the law, for the negro as for everybody else, is one upon which, when nakedly presented, all Americans must publicly agree. Privately, men may say that they are for inequality. They may even vote for it, in secret; but they cannot speak for it. And let it be borne in mind that it is simply the question of treating the negro citizen like every other citizen which is now pressing to the front. There is no demand that the South make electoral laws which will admit every ignorant or vicious colored man to 002018the ballot. Let the qualifications for the suffrage be what the separate States see fit to make them; only let them be impartially and honestly applied. What is destructive of all justice is discrimination against the intelligent and well-to-do negro, at the same time that the door is flung wide open for white men whom the very framers of Southern State Constitutions admit to be steeped in ignorance and vice. That is an attempt to build a democracy on the exclusion of a race; and it is the word of an American statesman who, being dead, yet speaketh, that no nation so builded can endure. This is the thing--unequal enforcement of the law; making flesh of the white man and fish of the negro; the adroit effort, under cover of crafty statutes, to destroy the political rights written into the supreme law of our land by what Summer called "irreversible guarantees"--it is this which has begun again powerfully to stir the hearts and consciences of lovers of liberty in this country.

Mr. Shepard, for whose interesting letter we gladly make room to-day, admits, as we expected he would, that his sense of justice is offended by the exclusion of qualified negroes from the suffrage. To favor whites above the blacks dwelling under the same laws is, he frankly says, to trample upon the Declaration of Independence and violate the express law of the land. This is a grievous and terrible thing, in Mr. Shepard's eyes, yet he would have nothing done to correct it. The penalties specifically pointed out in the Constitution, he would leave unenforced. Even that political redress, which Mr. Justice Holmes pointed out as the sure remedy for oppression of the negro citizen, Mr. Shepard deprecates. He excuses the South while blessing her. She is only doing what the North would do in her place. And then we have the familiar old talk about "racial" inferiority and the superiority of the white man as such.

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Now this, to be perfectly frank, is the talk of a man who believes in caste. The idea of the suffrage now inculcated in the South is one which Mr. Shepard would apparently endorse--namely, that the most embruted white man is better fitted to vote than the most cultivated black man. It is the inveterate prejudice, the superstition even, of caste which speaks in that. It dismisses all facts, flouts the noblest sentiments, spurns the most pathetic appeals--and all on the old unproved assertion that the worst white man is better qualified for representative government than the best black man.

We see from Mr. Shepard's words, as we may from Mr. Bryan's horrible inconsistencies, how hollow will ring Democratic protests against the oppression of the Filipinos, while there is Democratic acquiescence in injustice to the negro. It would even appear that the great reason for making the Philippines independent is lest, if we keep them, we shall keep the brown men under our heel abroad as we mean to the black men at home! Self-government, the right of representation, all the traditional cries of American freemen, are to be kept purely for use 7,000 miles away, while conveniently forgotten in this country. The campaign of the Democrats would be, in that respect, one of overflowing love for the brown brother whom they cannot see, but of callous disregard of the black brother whom they can see.

Open discrimination against the negro as a voter cannot stop there. It really means discrimination against him as a man. That is why we think it so hateful and perilous. It signifies a willingness to extinguish the hope of an entire race. Instead of encouraging its members to rise, and rewarding them when they do rise, it would close the door of opportunity to them all. That is the true implication of the exhortation to the colored men to give up their 002220"nonsense" about political rights, and to turn to "useful" pursuits. It means that what is wanted is a subject class of willing or forced workers. Wrapped up in the caste spirit which would shut the negro out from his political rights, is the intention to deny him his human rights. What thousands of people in the South are saying to him to-day, with only too much acquiescence, silent or expressed, from the North, is simply this: "With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,Trace your grave, and build your tomb,And weave your winding-sheet."

EDITORIALS OF EVENING POST OF SEPTEMBER 5, 1903

We cannot believe that Mr. Edward M. Shepard is feeling highly elated at the reception which his letter to the Evening Post in regard to negro suffrage has received at the hands of the press, unless, indeed, he is really a candidate for the Presidency. For this position he was at once nominated by the New York Tribune, which pointed out that as he assured Northerners of his deep regret at discrimination against the negro, and Southerners that he would not for the world reprimand them or give the negro any relief from that same discrimination, his straddle was perfect. Mr. Shepard is also nominated for the White House by the Columbia State, or rather renominated, for it first suggested his name for the Presidency several months ago. The New York Independent calls Mr. Shepard's letter a "bid for the Presidential nomination," and says that the "great fallacy and vice of Mr. Shepard's seductive letter is in its cowardice." 002321The Boston Journal thinks that the letter must prove a veritable boomerang, since he has tried in vain in three columns to formulate a policy.

The Southern press alone is really pleased by Mr. Shepard's expression of opinion. The New Orleans Times-Democrat pronounces Mr. Shepard "a statesman with a future." The Charleston Evening Post thinks that Mr. Shepard's answer completely disposed of the "would-be mischief- maker" who asked him the questions, which is in startling contrast to the Des Moines Register and Leader's opinion that Mr. Shepard's reply is "long, shifty, adroit, and inconclusive." The Springfield Republican feels that a fair summary of Mr. Shepard's letter is, "Let us do nothing." "At least," says the Boston Transcript, "he has not run away," but it thinks that he has added nothing new or definite to the question. Differing from the Southern papers, the Boston Herald thinks that this letter has not bettered Mr. Shepard's chances of obtaining the Democratic nomination. Nowhere outside of the South is the document treated as a statemanlike production. Nor could this be otherwise, for it has ever been the duty of a statesman to propose solutions for problems of state, not merely to describe evil conditions and then to deplore them.

LETTER OF E. H. S. TO EVENING POST OF SEPTEMBER 5, 1903

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EVENING POST:

Sir: In commenting this evening on Mr. Shepard's recent letter on the negro problem, the Evening Post states that it lacks the quality of statesmanship, because it fails to suggest any practical measures which will alleviate the present trouble. In view of this criticism, it appears to me highly pertinent to ask the Evening Post what practical measures it has to offer? Not only to the Evening Post, but to the statesmen of the Republican party, and to that greatest of all living statesmen, President Roosevelt, does this question, in the light of recent events, become peculiarly applicable. Mr. Shepard made this point in his letter. The Evening Post has so far completely ignored it; but it seems to me it is about time now to take some notice of it. The Republican party is in complete control of the Government. The law-making power is absolutely in its hands. What practical remedy does it propose that will improve the condition of the negro, and result in his ultimate welfare? Why waste ammunition on the Democrats, who are powerless in any event to do anything? Why not turn the searchlight of inquiry on the Republican party, and find out what it proposes doing? The Evening Post's policy, and that of President Roosevelt also, is not to "let the South alone." That is one point which the Evening Post for almost every day of the past year has striven to make clear. While it has by no means made it equally clear what measures it would suggest for advancing the condition of the negro, against one proposition it has set its face like a flint--the proposition to "let the South 002423alone." This is President Roosevelt's policy, and it is interesting to note what results have so far followed from it. The forcing of Crum upon a community, the entire educated and responsible portion of which was unanimously opposed to him, has certainly not added to the welfare of the colored people of South Carolina. It has not even added to Mr. Crum's welfare, for Mr. Roosevelt's party, with its nearly two-thirds majority in the United States Senate, having refused to confirm him, Mr. Crum is deprived of all remuneration for his labor. In Indianola, Miss., the arbitrary closing of the post office there, in order to punish the entire community for the conduct of a small minority, has certainly not resulted in any benefit to the negro race. The choice of Vardaman, the negro's bitterest enemy, as Governor of Mississippi, is surely proof of this. Here, then, are some practical results from the Evening Post's policy of "not letting the South alone."

But are they such results as the Evening Post is looking for in its desire to improve the welfare of the negro? Surely not; and therefore, once more, it becomes pertinent to ask, What practical measures do you propose for bringing about this condition? There are plenty of laws that you can propose, and which the Republican Congress can pass that will punish the Southern whites, as our eccentric President attempted to punish them at Indianola; but the fatal defect of all such measures is that they will make it infinitely worse for the negro. What many readers of the Evening Post would like to know is, what measures do you propose which will force the white people of the South to treat the negroes as you think they ought to be treated? Some practical suggestion in this line, just at present, would greatly aid the discussion. Upon this point it appears to me Mr. Shepard is as clear as crystal. He does not believe the South can be forced in this matter. He 002524thinks the only practical solution of the problem lies in the patient but hearty co-operation of the best men of both sections. This is Booker Washington's idea also, but evidently not the Evening Post's. Therefore, I ask again: What do you propose that is better? E. H. S.New York, September 5.

EDITORIAL OF EVENING POST OF SEPTEMBER 17, 1903 QUESTION AND ANSWER

A correspondent, in another column, puts some questions and indulges in some assumptions which we will not refuse to consider. One of the assumptions is, that the President's behavior on the negro question has resulted, among other things, in the choice of Vardaman for Governor of Mississippi. A Memphis paper, however, as we lately showed by quotation, regarded this choice, not as a counter to the Administration, but as the first blow at the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In fact, it is only one symptom of the widespread reaction at the South against the pledges of Reconstruction. From our correspondent's point of view, this reaction is the expression of the South's desire and determination to be "let alone." But as it is an unconcealed attempt to evade the Constitutional guarantees of political rights to the freedmen, it is a Southern attack upon the law of the land. Mr. Roosevelt would be a very "eccentric" President indeed if, while active in prosecuting Trusts under a special 002625statute, he should look with complacency on this wholesale removal of a class of Americans, numbering one in eight of the total population, from Federal protection by a new nullification--to give disfranchisement no harsher name.

He may be helpless to interpose, but he must feel some stirring of honest indignation. He may exert no initiative; but he would be something less than the defender of the Constitution, and less than the ruler of the whole people, if he discouraged a Congressional inquiry as to what should be done to redress the balance of the States in their representation at the Capitol.

Ought he not to be moved by the consideration that the South maintained its hegemony before the war by an iniquitous reckoning--it was in the bond, but still iniquitous--of three-fifths of its slave population in addition to its white, as a basis of representation, while it now coolly appropriates five-fifths and asks to be "let alone"? Even if there were no Constitutional amendment having regard to this contingency, would the North's supineness before such overweighting of the Southern white voter be laudable or contemptible? When the question arises in Congress (and, sooner or later, we look to see it arise), will it be for any other reason than that the South would not let us alone?

If the federal courts fail, and Congress fails, we are free to say that we have no "practical remedy" for the double wrong to blacks and whites. But the moral duty of not adjusting ourselves to it, of holding up the South to its own conscience and to the reprobation of mankind, would remain imperative. We are told by our correspondent that all agitation will increase the wretchedness of the blacks. So the abolitionists were falsely told when they asked slaveholders to emancipate, and Northern freemen to cease from all complicity with slavery. The South 002726unopposed will go to greater lengths than we have yet witnessed, or human nature must be revolutionized. What is more, the old intolerance of opinions at variance with those of the ruling race on human equality will gain fresh intensity. It is still vigorous. A Northerner travelling in the South and ready to respect manhood under any color cannot act naturally at table and in public conveyances without drawing upon himself the suspicion of being a social firebrand. To-day, as before the war, decent treatment and safety alike depend on conforming to Southern prejudices on the subject of the proper relation of "inferior" and "superior" races. In other words, though secession broke down, the old moral division between North and South has been maintained to a degree which debars the larger half of the Union from unrestrained intercourse and intermingling with the lesser half.

The appointment of Dr. Crum as Collector of the port of Charleston forms part of our correspondent's indictment of Mr. Roosevelt. He must excuse us, however, if we prefer to take Southern testimony as to the reason why this appointment was so galling, and why it was not overlooked like so many of McKinley's colored appointments. This was the fatal admission of Booker Washington to the President's table. The South will not let the President alone to be the judge of his own hospitality. But he is not a Southerner, nor on Southern soil, nor amenable in any way to Southern views of the place of the negro in the Creator's plans. He is, however, the President of the humblest and most degraded negro on the Sea Islands as truly as of "the entire educated and responsible portion" of the South Carolina community. In the Booker Washington incident we see again the purpose of the South to enforce abroad as well as within its own borders its views of human society. Before the war, it was bent on carrying its 002827slave chattels along with its views, and it was then that Lincoln declared it impossible for the house divided against itself to stand, and that it must become wholly slave or wholly free, while Seward truthfully portrayed the irrepressible conflict of ideas. Slavery then pretended to be sectional, while its domination and ambition were national. The sectionalism of the present hour is no less aggressive: the North must, silently at least, approve the degradation of the freedmen (and of thousands who were never slaves) from full citizenship to citizenship by sufferance; approve the dubiously legal, dishonorable, and fraudulent methods by which disfranchisement has been brought about; shut its eyes on the inequality before the law in the ordinary administration of justice which this disfranchisement entails, on the extraordinary barbarity of mob violence going along with disfranchisement, on the certain corruption of the whole body politic which sanctions these practices, on the national infection by example (as in the case of lynching at the stake, no longer the "peculiar institution" of a let-alone South). But this cannot be as long as the North has either memory or a conscience.

The grossest assumption, perhaps, of our correspondent is that Dr. Crum's appointment was part of a "policy," simply because the caste feeling of the South was opposed to it. Here it is visible to all the world that the South, like the trade-unions, has run up against the civil-service principle of carriere ouverte aux talens --a place for merit. It is true that Dr. Crum, as a Presidential appointee, was not obliged to pass an examination; but it is equally true that his fitness (color apart) has not been disputed, and that forty examinations passed with honor would not have reconciled the caste spirit one iota to his taking office. That spirit is of the "closed door." It condemns a race to hopeless inferiority and incapacity, 002928and then refuses to recognize the individual excellence which refutes its generalization. Now whether we agree or not to refrain from censuring exclusion of colored citizens from State offices at the South, shall we not demand that the Federal application of the civil-service principle be "let alone" in every part of the Union?

In conclusion, we will remind our correspondent, and all others sharing his opinions, that while humanity compels us to think first of the injustice and cruelty perpetrated on the blacks in the name of sectionalism, their welfare is not the sole consideration which prompts us to discuss the negro problem at all. Those who hint that peonage, for example, will tend to spread rather than to be suppressed if we talk about it, are quite capable of fulfilling their own prophecy. There still remains the good name of this republic; and there remains the truism that, not more in the nation than in State or municipality, can wrong go unchecked--even palliated and defended-- in one portion without contamination of the whole. The patriotic duty is clear, and we propose to discharge it, whichever party or section controls the national legislature. No doubt we shall have occasion to speak of the Republican Senate's denial to Dr. Crum of his just wage by refusing to confirm him, as we now in parting bid our correspondent not to gloat over this defection from Republican principle while arguing, earlier in his letter, that "the Republican party is in complete control of the Government."

LETTER OF MR. SHEPARD TO EVENING POST OF SEPTEMBER 25, 1903

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EVENING POST:

Sir: It was on August 28 last that you published and criticised my letter on negro suffrage written at your request. I have since waited, but in vain, for your own proposal to undo the wrong for which you upbraid the South. Nor have you yet said why your demand for a practical remedy (or for mere opinion) should be addressed to Democrats without responsible power rather than to Republicans definitely vested with such power. You condemned the view that the cure was not to be found in political agitation at the North or in Congressional enactment or other Federal interference, but rather in the slower, larger remedies of industrial education and progress. Later in your editorial note of the 5th inst. you said that it was not statesmanship "merely to describe evil conditions and then to deplore them, rather than to propose solutions for problems of state." But was that fair? Had I, after describing conditions and deploring them, ignored the solution? Had I not affirmed it to be in those slower and larger remedies? Surely it has always been quite as statesmanliek a duty to reject futile or injurious political remedies as to propose 003130or approve useful ones. More than once and at critical periods in the world's history, the best statesmanship, we all concede, preferred the slower cure of normal progress, social and educational, to artificial, crude, violent, useless exercises of Governmental force.

On September 17 I read in your columns the letter signed "E. H. S.," dated the 5th inst. That writer renews the question, What practical measure does The Evening Post offer? He also asks, as I had, Why are your questions about negro suffrage put to Democrats who are out of power rather than to Republicans responsibly in power? In your editorial you comment upon this letter. But why do you refuse to answer the two questions, as you had likewise refused when I put them? You deplore the situation and condemn those who fail to propose remedies. But you also fail to propose a remedy. You do not even suggest one--unless it be found in these words spoken of the President:

"He may be helpless to interpose, but he must feel some stirring of honest indignation. He may exert no initiative; but he would be something less than the defender of the Constitution, and less than the ruler of the whole people, if he discouraged a Congressional inquiry as to what should be done to redress the balance of the States in their representation at the Capitol. . . . If the Federal courts fail, and Congress fails, we are free to say that we 003231have no 'practical remedy' for the double wrong to blacks and whites."

Is this your best suggestion of a practical remedy? It would seem to be no more than an approval of the supposititious "honest indignation" of President Roosevelt--I say "supposititious," for when and where has he expressed such indignation? You assume that he can do nothing affirmative, that he cannot even take an initiative, although you urge him not to discourage Congressional inquiry. And does he threaten such discouragement? If so, he is even more discontent with the traditional limitations of his office than we have supposed. When, indeed, was it the right or function of the President to "discourage Congressional inquiry"? Has a President ever openly dared to discourage such inquiry when within Congressional jurisdiction? If you concede, as you seem to do; that the full duty of the national executive is done when, without affirmative act of any kind, he "feels honest indignation" and refrains from making and objection which it would be an impertinent violation of his duty to make--the does it not come to this, that you concede it to be the duty of the Republican President to do nothing? Yet in this matter you praise him unstintedly. But why, then, do you condemn Democrats with no power to do anything, members of a party which cannot enact a law, or 003332even pass a Congressional resolution? Or why, if Congressional inquiry be a practical remedy, or the beginning of one, should you not insist that the President encourage and enforce the inquiry? For that, it is entirely competent and well within the tradition of his office for the President to do.

You have already pointed out that the Federal courts have failed--Republican though they be. You seem now to assume that Congress will fail, although it is Republican. Failing both those sources of relief, you admit that even you have no "practical remedy." How, then, do you feel justified in condemning those who, like E. H. S. and myself, suggest the general drift and encouragement of educational and industrial processes as the true treatment of the difficulty?

Are you quite correct in some of your quotations? In your editorial of the 5th inst. You speak of "that political redress which Mr. Justice Holmes pointed out as a sure remedy for oppression of the negro citizen." And it was this "sure remedy" which you said I deprecated. But did Mr. Justice Holmes say that in "political redress" there was a "sure remedy"? Or did he say anything resembling that? The only thing to which you can possibly refer is his very proper statement (I89 U. S., p. 488) that "relief from a great political worng, if done, as alleged, by the people of a State and the State itself 003433must be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the Government of the United States." You quote the New York Independent as saying that the vice of my letter was in its "cowardice." Why did you not point out that in the very same article from which you quoted (in its issue of 3d September) the Independent, after quoting my assertion that it would be "calamitous to the American nation, and above all calamitous to the American negro, if the North were to undertake through the Federal Government to enforce upon the South the right of the negro to vote or to make a political issue of that right," said: "Very probably he is right, although if undertaken it would be by the nation and not by the North. . . . We trust even for justice to slower forces." Was not the policy of looking for justice in this matter to slower forces outside the law, which was thus approved by the Independent, the very policy which I had stated? If it were fit to quote that organ of Republican opinion when it said I was cowardly, was it not also fit to quote it when it said that in the very matter in which I was cowardly I was right? Was it quite fair, in quoting the Boston Herald, to use only its observation that my letter had not bettered my chances of political promotion and to add that "nowhere outside of the South" was my letter "treated as a statesmanlike production," when in the 003534very article of the Boston Herald before you, the reason and the only reason given for its belief that I had, by the letter, inflicted upon myself political injury, was its doubt whether the "majority of the politicians of the Southern States from which the most of the electoral votes must come are ready to support any man who expresses himself too sturdily for freedom and equal rights and equal justice for all." I cannot take to myself the full praise of the Herald that I had dealt with the topic "with fulness and with exemplary candor and courage," and that I had expressed myself "sturdily for freedom and equal rights and equal justice for all." But since it said those things, do you think it fair for you to give your readers to understand that it had condemned me?

May I not renew my questions? Have you any remedy to propose other than Congressional inquiry? Is your remedy under section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, or is it under section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment? Or if not, is there any remedy which is Constitutional, practicable, and wise? If so, what is it? And why should there be inquiry, if, as you insist, the facts are known? EDWARD M. SHEPARD. Brooklyn, September 25, 1903.

EDITORIAL OF EVENING POST OF SEPTEMBER 30, 1903 NEGRO DISFRANCHISEMENT AGAIN

Mr. Edward M. Shepard's second letter on negro disfranchisement, which we print to-day, seems to us to confuse the functions of the public man and the independent journalist. It is the main business of the latter to observe, to report truly, to criticise men and measures, to encourage public debate, to enlighten where he can, to lead when he may. The actual work of constructive statesmanship he must leave to others. Without party affiliations, never named for the Presidency as Mr. Shepard has been, it is not primarily incumbent upon us to point clearly to the way out of discomfort, suffering, injustice or oppression. Yet it is true that exposure of the wrong, to be effective, carries with it the suggestion of the right; and we maintain that we have not failed, in that sense, to offer a "practical remedy" for discrimination against qualified negro voters. With the further reminder to Mr. Shepard that the journalist, like the lawyer, cites such parts of a decision as may be germane to his argument, and does not feel compelled to imitate the [??] scholar whose caution was, "lest anything be unsaid," we pass to the substance of his letter.

We began our inquiry with Democratic leaders of party opinion because the evil complained of is perpetrated and maintained by the solid Democratic South. The Republican party, as to its sentiments regarding negro disfranchisement, is bound fast by its traditions and professions; and it is, as Mr. Shepard says, being in control of the Government, to be 003736held responsible for failure to act within its Constitutional powers. Its catechism is self-supplied, just as it has been in the case of the Filipinos. Moreover, it has already made pronouncements on this subject in State Conventions. What it was important to learn was, whether there was any uneasiness of mind--call it conscience--on the part of Northern Democratic politicians. They, too, have their responsibility, whether in Congress or not. It is, to admonish against and to oppose practices which are not Democratic, but Southern. Or are they Democratic, and will the party stand united in justification of them? We shall see.

The President will regard his own duties as to speaking his mind about disfranchisement as he has done about lynching. As the head of his party, he is presumably consulted about its policy, and about the issues which it is desirable or awkward to raise or let be raised on the eve of a Presidential year. Not very remote predecessors of his, intent on keeping out "controverted topics," have known how to smother inquiry and debate, and to nip schism in the bud. We do not believe that any weighing of his own chances will induce Mr. Roosevelt to dissuade Senator Hoar, for instance, from repeating on the floor of Congress that exhortation of the South to justice which he delivered at Salem the other day. If the Executive should, on the other hand, feel compelled to ask Congress to consider whether the present white representation in Congress is equitable, and, if not, how it may be made so, he would, in our opinion, be more truly the President of the whole people than if he remained a passive though indignant observer of the present iniquity.

We condemn the policy of drift because, even with the most enlightened activity and good will among Southerners and Northerners alike (it is a common cause), the progress away from the old 003837inhuman pro-slavery attitude of mind on the one hand, and from the debasement, superstitions, and vices of the negro population on the other, will be despairingly slow. The task is almost superhuman. Even the industrial adjustment is not complete. Deep down is the Southern determination not to acknowledge the colored American as a complete citizen, or a full human being. He may not hold office. It is not desired that he should rise in the social scale to the extent of his training and capacity. He is doomed once and for all to a subordinate place. Against such a monstrous disposition the policy of drift is a mockery, whether viewed as "statesmanship" or as a "practical remedy."

But we say again that over against drift we have aggression--Southern violation of faith towards the nation and the negro, deliberate evasion of the Constitutional safeguards of political equality, the perversion of the sentiments of our youth born since the Civil War, the expunging of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech and second inaugural. This moral deterioration cannot be endured; it must be resisted. Its concrete embodiment in unequal application of the suffrage laws can be directly attacked under clear warrant of Constitutional authority. Is it or is it not "practical" to enforce the law of the land? In addition to the explicit powers conferred by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the House is final judge of the qualifications of its members. It can, if it chooses, refuse to seat men bearing credentials which are, on their face, the evidence of race discrimination and the suffrage suppressed. Until such remedies are attempted, it is vain to protest that nothing practical is proposed by those who cry out against manifest and inexcusable political wrongs.