The Republicans have several times threatened to alter this anomalous condition of affairs. In 1890, Mr. Lodge introduced in the House of Representatives a bill providing for the appointment of federal election commissioners, on petition of local voters, endowed with powers to register and count all votes, even in the face of the opposition of local officers. This measure, which passed the House, was at length killed in the Senate. In their platform of 1904, the Republicans declared in favor of restoring the negro to his rights under the Constitution, and for political purposes the party in the House later coupled a registration and election law with the measure providing for publicity of campaign contributions. It was not acted upon in the Senate. In 1908, the Republicans in their platform declared "once more and without reservation, for the enforcement in letter and spirit of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution which were designed for the protection and advancement of the negro," and condemned all devices designed to disfranchise him on grounds of color alone. Although they have been in possession of all branches of the Federal government several times, the Republicans have deemed it inexpedient to carry out their campaign promises. With the decline in the influence of the Civil War veterans in politics, the possibility of Federal interference has steadily decreased. The North had never been abolitionist in temper or political belief, as the vote of the Free Soil party demonstrates. The Republican party was a homestead, railway, and protectionist party opposed to slavery in the territories, and its great leader, Lincoln, had long been on record as opposed to political and social equality for the negro. Emancipation had come as a stroke of fortune--not because a majority of the people had deliberately come to the conclusion that it was a measure of justice. As in the French Revolution at its height, the extreme radicals forged to the front for a time, so during the Civil War and its aftermath, "radical" Republicans held the center of the stage and gave to politics a flavor of talk about "human rights" which was foreign to practical statesmen like Clay and Webster. In a little while, practical men came to the helm once more, and they were primarily interested in economic matters--railways, finance, tariff, corporations, natural resources, and western development. The cash nexus with the South was formed once more, and made far stronger and subtler than in olden days. Agitation of the negro question became bad form in the North, except for quadrennial political purposes. _The Negro Problem_