representation--indeed it is only in that connection that the question has
been seriously mooted; and he has advised them to go slow in seeking to
enforce their civil and political rights, which, in effect, means silent
submission to injustice. Southern white men may applaud this advice as
wise, because it fits in with their purposes; but Senator McEnery of
Louisiana, in a recent article in the _Independent_, voices the Southern
white opinion of such acquiescence when he says: "What other race would
have submitted so many years to slavery without complaint? _What other
race would have submitted so quietly to disfranchisement?_ These facts
stamp his (the Negro's) inferiority to the white race." The time to
philosophize about the good there is in evil, is not while its correction
is still possible, but, if at all, after all hope of correction is past.
Until then it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation. To try to read
any good thing into these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to accept
them as an accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one's race.
Those who commit crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing
spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber. Silence were better.

It has become fashionable to question the wisdom of the Fifteenth
Amendment. I believe it to have been an act of the highest statesmanship,
based upon the fundamental idea of this Republic, entirely justified by
conditions; experimental in its nature, perhaps, as every new thing must
be, but just in principle; a choice between methods, of which it seemed
to the great statesmen of that epoch the wisest and the best, and
essentially the most just, bearing in mind the interests of the freedmen
and the Nation, as well as the feelings of the Southern whites; never
fairly tried, and therefore, not yet to be justly condemned. Not one of
those who condemn it, has been able, even in the light of subsequent
events, to suggest a better method by which the liberty and civil rights
of the freedmen and their descendants could have been protected. Its