32 less probable than some minds imagine. In any case, and this is the essential point, if the social and political degradation of the race is now averted in the South, its partial emigration will have a purely voluntary character ; and the fatal, the murderous idea of a forced expatriation in a body will disappear from the first moment. VIII. I trust, Mr. President, that no one will mistake my true meaning. At the first word that is uttered to-day concerning negro suffrage, trenchant objections rise up on all sides. “ What, you are anxious to let the negroes vote ! The point at stake is to insure their subsistence, and you trouble yourself about their rights ! You wish to resolve all questions at once 1 Of these slaves of yesterday, your feverish impatience aspires to-day to make citizens ! You do not comprehend that such haste sets at naught the very laws of social progress ; that it outstrips the demands of public opinion ; that it even astonishes the good sense of the negroes, who do not ask so much.” Be this as it may, we shall not ask less. Whether the majority of the negroes in the South do or do not vote, matters not in the least to us. It is not an idle question of voting that claims our attention, but a vital question of dignity. Let conditions be placed on the suffrage of the negroes, let but few of them be admitted at first to the exercise of political rights ; we willingly consent—what we do not accept, what we oppose as an infamous act, as a social crime, is the exclusion of the race. The number of negro voters in the South is of little importance, provided that there are any at all. Should there be none, the meaning of such a fact could not be doubtful; it would signify, not that you had wished to set aside incompetent voters, but that you had sought to maintain the radical incompetency of every man with a colored skin. This is an insult which comprises and entails every kind of insult; it is an injustice which engenders every kind of in
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