M. de Tocqueville, when speaking of the influence of religion in the United States, says:

"Nothing in Christianity, nor even in Catholicism, is absolutely opposed to the spirit of democracy, and there is much favorable to it."

He very erroneously confuses Christianity and Catholicism. Christianity pure and simple, as at its origin, is wholly democratic, and is certainly highly favorable to the maintenance of democracy. Did it not in Holland and the United States found and support a free democracy? But Catholicism, the finished model of autocratic theocracy, inspired the despotism of Louis XIV., and of Philip II, resisted the French Revolution, and nullified its effects, and is now leagued with aristocracy for the purpose of re-establishing the old system everywhere possible.

A religion which accords to a human being the unheard-of attribute of infallibility; which is overloaded with customs and superstitions wholly contrary to the gospel; which is as far removed from the teaching of Christ as light from darkness; and which, above all, condemns modern liberties, and particularly liberty of conscience-such a religion as this is never likely to be adopted by the civilized nations of the future.

EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

THE HYSTERIA OF SECTIONAL AGITATION.

THAT section of the Republican press which may fitly be described as Red Republican, getting its inspiration from a speech delivered by Mr. Blaine just after his defeat for President in 1884, is seeking to rekindle the angry passions of the era of Reconstruction on a claim, of Mr. Blaine's suggestion, that the negro vote is suppressed, and the last three amendments to the Constitution nullified, by the white people of the South. Beneath this incendiary scheme, trumped up for present party uses, lurk the demons of race war and anarchy. In the December and February issues of the FORUM it finds a ruthless, if not a powerful, champion in Mr. Murat Halstead, who, with a great array of figures and an ostentatious display of indignant patriotism and affected candor, undertakes to prove the case of his associates in a purpose as mischievous and misleading as any that ever confused and imbittered the politics of the country.

In order to lay the foundation for his arraignment of two generations of his countrymen, one at least of which had no part or lot in the Rebellion, and the other of which is passing rapidly from the scene, it is assumed by Mr. Halstead, nearly twentythree years after the firing of the last shot in that bloody conflict, that loyalty to the Constitution is confined to a single section of the Union, and in that section limited to a single party. It is assumed that the white people of the other section are not merely disloyal, but dishonest and inhuman; the friends of assassination, partly for the love of it and partly for its advantage as a force in the elections. It is assumed that the black people of this incriminated section are not only qualified to vote intelligently, but that they agree entirely with Mr. Halstead, and are, as a matter of course, one and all ardent Red Republi

cans.

This species of reasoning is certainly ingenious in its sim

1

plicity. It admits of no flaws or doubts. Cast up the white and black votes of a State or congressional district—so runs its argument and wherever a Democrat is found representing a community in which there happens to be a black majority, set it down to fraud and murder. It does not cross the mind of the author of this indictment against a whole people that any white man living on the south side of the old battle line can be less violent and sanguinary than he seems to be himself; and, taking his measure of southern elections by methods which prevail in Ohio, he writes of intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, bribery, and the lawless arts of corrupt political management in the great cities of the North, as if they had an existence exclusively at the South.

It is only fair to Mr. Halstead to say that he is in this, if in nothing else, perfectly consistent. During two decades he has made it the business of his life to stir up sectional hate, to bend the history of every day to the service of sectional strife, and to contribute, so far as I can recall, not one word to the cause of sectional good-will. Thus, with the best intentions, as he conscientiously believes, he has surrounded himself, and filled the air about him, with a troop of political hobgoblins, who play strange, fantastic pranks upon his fancy. They are none the less the phantoms of an inflamed patriotism, an imperious and restless temper, and an imagination (if he will forgive my saying so) not yet quite cured of its original, and, for the matter of that, its aboriginal, luridity and fervor. "Difficilem oportet aurem habere ad crimina." Let us, however, look into the matter in detail, and, to obtain a better standpoint for our observation, let us see how Mr. Halstead is wont to treat differences of opinion as to this great question when he is not on dress parade in the FORUM, but at home in the office of the "Commercial Gazette."

In the issue of that redoubtable journal for the 12th of January last, I find a communication from the Hon. William M. Dickson, a reputable citizen of Cincinnati and an ex-judge of Hamilton County. It was written, apparently, as a kind of protest against Mr. Halstead's interminable tirades against the South. From it I make the following relevant and suggestive quotation:

men.

"Shall we continue a sectional agitation until we compel the southern States to submit to the rule of the ignorant field-hands? Would Cincinnati vote in the affirmative on this question? This you dodge. You say that Cincinnati would vote by an overwhelming majority for the maintenance of the rights of No doubt of that; but that is not my question. The Constitution and the law of Ohio guarantee to the colored children of Oxford, O., admission to the public schools, but the white citizens of that village nullify that Constitution, and deny the colored children their school rights; and this not in Mississippi, but in the shadow of Paddy's Run, the town honored by your birth. Seventyfive of the leading citizens have banded together to boycott these poor negro children; not, mark you, to protect themselves against the vote, the rule of these negroes, but to deny to them the opportunity of education. And you are silent! The wrongs of the negro of Louisiana touch you, but not those at your own door. And yet the people of Oxford would vote to enforce negro rule in Louisiana. Now, in my opinion, it is cruel, it is inhuman, to deny to the colored children the school. It is also illegal, unconstitutional, in every way regrettable, to deny to the southern negro his vote, and it is monstrous injustice to give the whites there the advantage in representation of this negro vote. But of what value in either place to the negro are my unavailing regrets? If race prejudice is cruel and inhuman, how can I help it? If civilization would perish to allow the ignorant field-hands South to rule, how dare I to enforce that rule? And if I dared to enforce it, how could I succeed? Were you in power to-day, what would or could you do? Reduce, you say, representation under the Fourteenth Amendment? You can't. That part of the Fourteenth Amendment is dead-killed by the Fifteenth Amendment. What, then, do you propose? A vain and aimless agitation? That is child's play. Will you send an army South to compel submission to the rule of the ignorant field-hand? Grant tried this; sent soldiers into the Legislature of Louisiana; unseated certain members and seated others. Can you do now what Grant failed to do then? Would Cincinnati aid you in sending an armed force South? Would it be good for the negro to awaken at this time a fierce race struggle ? These are plain questions; will you answer them? Flighty anathemas, skyrocket declamation, droll buffoonery, may amuse the groundlings; they do not deceive the judicious. The race question is a difficult one; it becomes fearfully difficult in a community where the intelligent white man is outnumbered five to one by the ignorant field-hand. Then arises a conflict of rights. In 1819 John Quincy Adams recorded in his diary, speaking of the race problem as it then presented itself with slavery, these words: This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution.' The problem of to-day is a question between the rights of Civilization and the Constitution. Until we can see our way clear to a proper solution of this problem, is it not the part of wisdom to leave it to the people directly involved in it? At all events it is clear that it would better things to refer this question to the citizens of Oxford."

Surely there is nothing very unpatriotic in this, and, as a suggestion of public policy, there are those who will think it not

wholly foolish. It offers a fair challenge to Mr. Halstead, and furnishes him matter for serious consideration. How does he meet it? The following extract from the same issue of his journal will show:

"Judge William M. Dickson's last communication to us touching politics appears in small type in another column. He repeats his inquiry about the rule of the South by 'ignorant field-hands.' In the first place, we are in favor of the enforcement of the Constitution of the United States. The judge goes on about 'field-hands.' There are no men in any country to whose hands the responsibilities of citizenship may be more safely trusted than 'field-hands.' The 'field-hands' of the South, as well as of the North, possess the ballot, and we are in favor of the full and complete recognition of their rights, the blacks as well as the whites. The judge refers to the prejudices in Ohio against the blacks, and to outbreaks in Butler County. Well, that happens to be the most bigoted Democratic county in the State, and we do not regard the exercise of prejudices against colored people in that part of the world as an example to be followed. Those prejudices, we presume, will wear out. At least we shall not respect them. The judge tells us what we can and cannot do about a fair ballot in the South. There are several things he doesn't know. He is a very inaccurate person. If we elect a Republican President and Congress, we shall see whether the terms upon which the reconstructed States were restored are to be disregarded. In fact, the judge is about the most ignorant man about the actualities of politics that we know. 'Can we do what Grant failed to do?' the judge asks. Yes, we think we can. The people were then weak through their generosity, and anxious to be magnanimous. Grant was a soldier, and was through with fighting. As the case stands and events drift, the whole country is to be governed by the Democratic Party of the South using the black enumeration simply to augment the force of the white vote. The manhood of the North must at least demand white equality. The judge belongs in the Democratic Party, and very low down in it, and we do not think Republicans need to pay the slightest attention to his miserable spirit of acquiescence in a wrong which is one of the greatest of which there is record. He should go to Oxford, O., to live, and pose as an old Abolitionist on the street corners."

It does not occur to Mr. Halstead whilst "presuming" that race prejudices will "wear out" in Ohio, that it might not be unfair to give them a chance to "wear out" at the South also. Nor, though a humorist, does he catch the point of his own joke that, in the thick of the hot political battle which raged for ten years after the war, "the people were weak through their generosity, and anxious to be magnanimous." A very different story, indeed, is told by the records of congressional debate and the newspaper histories of the time. If ever the government at Washington was strong, and one party completely in the ascend