I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what to say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I study it the less I know, and those among you who give it the most anxious thought are the most perplexed, the subject has so many conflicting aspects. In the first place there is the evolution of an undeveloped race. Every race has a right to fair play in the world and to make the most of its capacities, and to the help of the more favored in the attempt. If the suggestion recently made of a wholesale migration to Mexico were carried out, the South would be relieved in many ways, though the labor problem would be a serious one for a long time, but the "elevation" would be lost sight of or relegated to a foreign missionary enterprise; and as for results to the colored people themselves, there is the example of Hayti. If another suggestion, that of abandoning certain States to this race, were carried out, there is the example of Hayti again, and, besides, an anomaly introduced into the Republic foreign to its traditions, spirit, aspirations, and process of assimilation, alien to the entire historic movement of the Aryan races, and infinitely more dangerous to the idea of the Republic than if solid Ireland were dumped down in the Mississippi valley as an independent State. On the other hand, there rests upon you the responsibility of maintaining a civilization--the civilization of America, not of Hayti or of Guatemala which we have so hardly won. It is neither to be expected nor desired that you should be ruled by an undeveloped race, ignorant of law, letters, history, politics, political economy. There is no right anywhere in numbers or unintelligence to rule intelligence. It is a travesty of civilization. No Northern State that I know of would submit to be ruled by an undeveloped race. And human nature is exactly in the South what it is in the North. That is one impregnable fact, to be taken as the basis of all our calculations; the whites of the South will not, cannot, be dominated, as matters now stand, by the colored race. But, then, there is the suffrage, the universal, unqualified suffrage. And here is the dilemma. Suffrage once given, cannot be suppressed or denied, perverted by chicane or bribery without incalculable damage to the whole political body. Irregular methods once indulged in for one purpose, and towards one class, so sap the moral sense that they come to be used for all purposes. The danger is ultimately as great to those who suppress or pervert as it is to the suppressed and corrupted. It is the demoralization of all sound political action and life. I know whereof I speak. In the North, bribery in elections and intimidation are fatal to public morality. The legislature elected by bribery is a bribable body.