ART. IV.-THE RACE PROBLEM-THE SITUATION. UNUSUAL excitement has prevailed throughout the country during the past year over the race problem. More or less this has been true of the southern section ever since the war. Of late the discussion has been deflected somewhat from the usual line of accounts of Negro lawlessness by the introduction of new topics related to the general subject. Propositions looking to the repeal of the Fifteenth Amend ment of the United States Constitution, and also to the depor tation of the colored people to some other country, as Africa, or South America, have been introduced into the Mississippi Legislature and into the Congress of the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment, Section 1, declares: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. SEC. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. It is now generally admitted by the South that the right of the Negroes to vote, which the Fifteenth Amendment confers, has been thwarted; and yet the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, that where such right has been denied, or in any way abridged, the Negroes shall not be reckoned in the basis of representation, has been unheeded. The Fourteenth Amendment provides: SEC. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged except for participation in the rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. The press of the country, secular and religious, partisan and non-partisan, political and non-political, has vigorously, and sometimes with passionate vehemence, discussed the Race question. Those from one section have treated it from their point of view, and those from the other section from another aspect. That the record may be complete, and that readers may know the extreme sectional ideas held by one class of the people of the country, the respective views of leading journals in both sections of the country are given. They contain important admissions as to the suppression of the colored vote, sometimes by force, but more often latterly by fraud. As to the fact of such suppression they are conclusive. I. THE SOUTHERN PRESS. 1. The Southern journals deprecate the continued agitation of the Race problem as being kept up by partisans and for partisan purposes. They allege that those who discuss it unfavorably to the Southern view do so for partisan and political purposes. The Nashville American: We do not really give to this Ingalls theory any serious thought. Not but that Mr. Ingalls, in order to solidify himself with a certain element in Kansas, is willing and eager to arm himself with torch and dagger, but that we do not look to see his advice and solution accepted. The Savannah News: The Senator (Ingalls) bases his answer on the assumption that the blacks are refused a free ballot. He admits that they have justice in every other respect. He assumes that they are all Republicans, and that if they were not intimidated they would vote the Republican ticket, and would be in control of Municipal, County, and State affairs where they are in the majority. The Macon Telegraph, Georgia : Southern Negroes should be independent enough to estimate the welfare of their race as of more importance than the success of the Republican party, and act accordingly. The New Orleans Times-Democrat: He, Ingalls, is treating this question from a narrow, partisan stand-point, considering the interests of the Republican party and not that of the country. If all he proposes were done, we would not be one whit nearer the solution. The Mobile Register: The South is twenty years older now than then. All the threats and thunders of the Republican party cannot force us to go back to the days of rapine and bloodshed. 2. The spirit now displayed on this subject by the people in the South is quite similar to that evinced by the same people in the ante-bellum times. In the Senate and House of Congress, on the stump and in their journals, they said: "Let us alone;" "It is our affair." While they were thus demanding, they were at that very time taking measures to secede from the Union. The Secretaries of War and of the Navy had so distributed and directed the naval and military forces of the nation that when secession should occur it would be more easy and assured, and the national ability to cope with and subdue secession would be more difficult and doubtful. Such is the tone of the Southern journals to-day. Take examples : The New Orleans says: The southern people may not, like Senator Ingalls, philosophize at a safe distance. They must, at every hour of the day, deal practically with the Negro question, living, as we do, face to face with it in the concrete. The Louisville Courier-Journal: The people of the South have local self-government, and they will keep it. . . . The Negro question, to be sure, is not solved; but the conviction is growing in the North and in the South, among the Negroes themselves, that the Southern States themselves must find the solution, and that the interference of such men as Senator Ingalls only postpones the accomplishment of the result which all good men desire. The Atlanta Constitution, Georgia: The relations between the blacks and the whites will have to be adjusted by those affected by them. The St. Louis Anzeiger; des Westens : If the South be left in peace-if men like Ingalls were not continually impressing it on the Negro that every good emanates from the Republican party and every evil from the Democratic party, the Southern people, who, on the whole, wish well to the Negro, will discover a mode of settling the controversy on principles of justice with the Negro who is living in their midst. 3. The spirit of the extreme Southern papers is that of defiance of the Constitution and of the public sentiment which demands that the Constitution shall be observed. There is an unconcealed air of disdain at any trammels which laws or constitution may place upon them. Between the lines can be plainly read, "What are you going to do about it?" The Birmingham Age-IIerald, Alabama: If there should be civil war for this cause it will be civil war in the strict sense of that term, and not a sectional contest, as was that of 1861-65. If war is begun to enforce Negro supremacy in the South it will be begun by the Republican party. The Republicans will be the aggressors, and the Democrats of the entire Union-not those of the South alone-will defend the issue. The Washington Capital: The "justice" for which Mr. Ingalls pleaded in impassioned words would only result in the precipitation of a conflict which would light incendiary fires in every part of the South, only to end in deluging that section with blood. The "bottom rail has been on top once in the South. It will not be again until that region meets the fate of IIayti. The Mobile Register: The indecent spectacle of Afric-American tutes one of the foulest pages of history. South swept the nasty thing out of existence. to repeat the history of 1868-1874. government consti II. THE NORTHERN VIEW. The whites of the 1. The Northern journals generally claim that the question must be solved as Senator Ingalls demands- that is, by practicing in good faith justice toward the black man. By fairness and kindness, and not by violence and fraud. The Boston Journal: The one rallying-cry of those Southern citizens who are determined to cause a reaction against the revolution brought on by the civil war, is the assertion that the Negro must be kept under or he will be guilty of gross tyrannies over the class which formerly enslaved him, and lived off the fruits of his unpaid, or, to put it more directly, his stolen, labor. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat: "I appeal to the South," Senator Ingalls exclaims, "to try the experiment of justice." But that is exactly what the South is most determined not to do. The story of her treatment of the ex-slaves ever since they were made citizens is one of deliberate and persevering violation of their rights. By processes of fraud and violence as notorious as they are indefensible she has practically deprived them of the suffrage, and of all power or opportu nity to influence the course of public events, and she asks that the situation thus brought about shall be indorsed and confirmed for all time. The Minneapolis Tribune: It is the Southern men themselves who have introduced the subject into the Senate, and Mr. Ingalls is fairly entitled to express his views. The speech is rhetorical and brilliant, and it is full of stinging criticism. It is, of course, a one-sided, partisan speech, yet from its own point of view it is strictly true. The colored race has suffered the most fearful wrongs and indignities since the war, and the Negro's disfranchisement by violence, intimidation, and fraud cheats the whole country as well as the emancipated Race. The New York Press: Is the North content to consent to this? Is the civil compact of majority rule to be ignored in most of the Southern States? Is the Negro to be politically abandoned, and yet left with his rapidly-increasing offspring to count one each in the census return, when the distribution of representatives in Congress comes up for discussion next winter? These are questions which the people of this country are now facing. 2. The calm, resolute spirit of the North encounters the wild, reckless expressions of the South with cool, convincing logic and the philosophy of right and fairness. The Brooklyn Times: The Negroes will stay here, and they will be protected in the exercise of their rights. It is a difficult problem, but American statesmanship has confronted and overcome problems even more difficult. The Independent : The Senator's solution of the problem lies in the single word justice, which means to treat the colored man as a citizen, possessing the same inalienable rights that belong to the white race. The sooner southern whites come to this conclusion the better for themselves and the whole country. The Pittsburg Dispatch: This is the beginning of the final contest, unless the utterances of the administration are meaningless and the accord between them and Senator Ingalls's speech accidental. The conflict is likely to be the most important since the crop from like seeds was harvested upon bloody fields twenty-five years ago. The Toledo Blade: It is a grave truth that the whites of the South are dwelling above a volcano. With any other race than the African the country would have been deluged with blood long ago; and it is not expected that even the blacks in the Southern States will submit indefinitely to the denial of rights accorded them every-where |