loyal to what we are saying here and now.' Going South, a woman, a
temperance woman, and a Northern temperance woman--three great barriers
to their good will yonder--I was received by them with a confidence that
was one of the most delightful surprises of my life. I think we have
wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so. The reason was, in
part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguards
on the ballot box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates.
They rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy
stick their sceptre. It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it
fair that a plantation Negro, who can neither read nor write, whose
ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own
mule, should be entrusted with the ballot. We ought to have put an
educational test upon that ballot from the first. The Anglo-Saxon race
will never submit to be dominated by the Negro so long as his altitude
reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon, and the power
of appreciating the amount of liquor that a dollar will buy. New England
would no more submit to this than South Carolina. 'Better whisky and
more of it' has been the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs in the
Southern localities where local option was snowed under by the colored
vote. Temperance has no enemy like that, for it is unreasoning and
unreasonable. Tonight it promises in a great congregation to vote for
temperance at the polls tomorrow; but tomorrow twenty-five cents changes
that vote in favor of the liquor-seller.

"I pity the southerners, and I believe the great mass of them are as
conscientious and kindly intentioned toward the colored man as an equal
number of white church-members of the North. Would-be demagogues lead
the colored people to destruction. Half-drunken white roughs murder them
at the polls, or intimidate them so that they do not vote. But the
better class of people must not be blamed for this, and a more