THE NEGRO SELLING HIS VOTE.

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blacks had of the ballot-that it was something they could sell, and something which they have sold from that day to this, their chief ambition being to get a good price. The negro is for sale to-day as much as ever. He is put up at auction on the block, or rather he puts himself up. A New England pastor in Florida told me of a scene he witnessed at the polls. A negro got up on a box, and said: "I hasn't voted. Does any gemman want to speak to me?" Of course he found a gemman" who was ready to whisper something in his ear. But he was not so simple as to take the first bid, and asked if "any oder gemman wanted to speak to him"; and after receiving several confidential communications, yielded to the arguments of the "gemman who spoke the loudest, or in the way that he could best understand. All are not so unblushing as this. One colored brother, I was told, had a conscience about the matter, and made it a principle not to take more than two dollars and a half for his vote, saying that "that was all it was worth"!

دو

In such hands the suffrage is a farce-not a farce in the sense that it is only a subject for laughter, but a horrible farce, in which the stake played for in this tossing of the dice is the government of a people that profess to be civilized, with the effect of a general demoralization of both races, whites and blacks, one of which thinks it is no harm to buy what the other is so ready to sell. So general has this buying and selling become, that many have told me that it was absolutely impossible to have an honest vote, and they had given it up in despair.

From buying votes, it is but a step to fraud in counting them, which is cheaper, and quite as effective; or ballotboxes may be emptied of the "wrong" votes, and stuffed with the "right" kind. There is but one step furtherto intimidation, when men come to the polls with shot

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FRAUD AND INTIMIDATION.

guns, not of course to do any mischief, but as a gentle hint to the other side that it might be safer to retire into the woods or to their cabins, and leave the business of electing public officers to those who understand it better. If this mere show of force does not prove sufficient, the guns are used in a more effective way. We hear of violence not unfrequently ending in murder; of midnight assassinations committed by masked marauders-Ku Klux Klans, or whatever they may be called. These outrages have produced at the North such a feeling of indignation, that there is a general outcry that stern measures be taken for their suppression. Of course such cowardly crimes should be punished with all the power of the law. The only question is, By what power shall they be punished? Murder is a crime against the State, to be punished by the State. If a murder is committed in the streets of New York, we do not send to Washington to ask for aid in bringing the murderer to justice. There may be a case of crime so extreme, and comprehending so many persons, that the State authorities are powerless, and the General Government may be asked to interfere. Thus if there were a riot in this city, such as we saw in 1863, which should threaten, if unchecked, to overthrow all law, and perhaps lay the city in ashes, the President might order the troops from Governor's Island to give support to the police in enforcing order; but surely we do not look to that source of authority to manage the internal affairs of our State. No more can it be called to perform police duty in the South. There, as at the North, crimes must be punished by the States in which they are committed. If the General Government can give indirect aid, of course it will; but with the best intention, it can hardly be expected to reach out its long arm from Washington to lay hold of fugitives in the swamps and cane-brakes of the South.

DEMAND FOR A FREE BALLOT.

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But the demand is for the President, supported by Congress, to interfere to secure a free and honest ballot at the South! This might well set us at the North to thinking whether we are not responsible for this complication of affairs. We have forced universal suffrage upon the South, and now are asked to step in to save it from the natural consequence of our own blunders and mistakes.

Have we well considered what it means to " 'regulate elections" at the South? Do we mean to send an army there, and have soldiers stand guard at the polls? The experiment of military government has been tried with a result that is not encouraging. After the war, the power at command was almost absolute. When General Grant was President of the United States, and Commander of the Army and Navy, he had lieutenants in the South (all brave in fighting battles, but who had a limited experience in civil life) that were ready to declare martial law in every city from Richmond to New Orleans; to surround every State-house with soldiers; and to dictate the choice of rulers at the point of the bayonet. Such extreme measures were not resorted to (except perhaps in one instance, by Sheridan at New Orleans); yet during the whole of General Grant's eight years of power, there was in the South what amounted to a military occupation, with all the pressure that it brings to bear on legislation. But so utter was the failure of this policy of coercion, that scarcely had Mr. Hayes been inaugurated when, under the advice of his distinguished Secretary of State, Mr. Evarts, it was abandoned as absolutely beyond the power of the National Government.

"Ah, then," say some, there is no hope for the emancipated slaves-emancipated only in name! If the South will not do them justice, and the North cannot enforce it, they are left to be ground between the upper and nether

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THE WHOLE SOUTH BEARS THE ODIUM.

millstones!" Not quite so bad as that! Injustice always brings its own punishment. The South is suffering to-day from the lawlessness within her borders. Every "outrage" that is sent on the wings of lightning to the North, stirs up anew the feeling of indignation, and is a warning to Northern people and Northern capital to keep away from a land thus smitten by the pestilence. Of course, in this sweeping condemnation the good people of the South suffer with the bad: because it is assumed that these foul deeds are upheld, or at least condoned, by public opinion. In this there is a degree of injustice. Quiet and peaceable men express their horror and disgust at them, but say that they are the work of lawless ruffians, such as infest every community, and who are not more numerous at the South than the class of professional criminals at the North. But however few they may be, they seem to be strong enough to defy the law: for I have yet to hear of a single man punished for his part in these midnight assassinations! And so long as murderers walk abroad in the light of day without fear, the whole community must bear the odium. If the Southern States have not the power or the will to arrest the perpetrators of such crimes and bring them to justice, let them take the responsibility. They are the agents for the punishment of evil-doers, and ought not to bear the sword in vain. If they fail in their duty, it is their fault, and not ours. If they will not punish violence and blood, on them will rest the shame and the disgrace, and theirs will be the inevitable punishment: for such things cannot be done in a civilized community without provoking a terrible retribution in the demoralization which always follows unpunished crime.

CHAPTER XI.

CAPACITY OF THE NEGRO-HIS POSITION IN THE NORTH. THE COLOR LINE IN NEW ENGLAND.

I should have more hope of the progress of the African in the future, if he had made more progress in the past. But his history is not encouraging. What he has done on his native continent is all a blank; but what has he done since he was transplanted to America?--for he has been here as long as the white man. The first slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va., in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Thus the two races. began their career together on the Western Continent, and yet who can for an instant compare the achievements of the one with those of the other! During the long lapse of two hundred and seventy years, the negro race has not produced a single great leader. It will not do say that this has been because they were kept down. A great race, numbering millions, cannot be kept down. Besides, in half the country there was no effort to keep them down for slavery in the North was abolished a century ago, and yet the same inferiority exists. I do not mention this with any feeling of pride in the superiority of the white race; on the contrary it is with extreme

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