so influenced Northern opinion that it stands mute, and leaves the colored
people, upon whom the North conferred liberty, to the tender mercies of
those who have always denied their fitness for it.

It may be said, in passing, that the word "Negro," where used in this
paper, is used solely for convenience. By the census of 1890 there were
1,000,000 colored people in the country who were half, or more than half,
white, and logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many who
share the white blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion that the
race problem in the United States concerns the welfare and the status of a
mixed race. Their rights are not one whit the more sacred because of this
fact; but in an argument where injustice is sought to be excused because
of fundamental differences of race, it is well enough to bear in mind that
the race whose rights and liberties are endangered all over this country
by disfranchisement at the South, are the colored people who live in the
United States to-day, and not the low-browed, man-eating savage whom the
Southern white likes to set upon a block and contrast with Shakespeare and
Newton and Washington and Lincoln.

Despite and in defiance of the Federal Constitution, to-day in the six
Southern States of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, South
Carolina and Virginia, containing an aggregate colored population of about
6,000,000, these have been, to all intents and purposes, denied, so far
as the States can effect it, the right to vote. This disfranchisement is
accomplished by various methods, devised with much transparent ingenuity,
the effort being in each instance to violate the spirit of the Federal
Constitution by disfranchising the Negro, while seeming to respect its
letter by avoiding the mention of race or color.

These restrictions fall into three groups. The first comprises a property