At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for disfranchisement in Maryland. So we have the advancing demand by Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment. And just recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to provide for "Jim Crow" distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington. How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the slavery question! _Fighting to Put the Negro Down_ I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form) with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all coloured men to all white men: the argument that "one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro," and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a beast. I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled "Is the Negro a Beast?" and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him. One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right of the white man to rule the Negro. "God intended the white man to rule," says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble servant." And finally there is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong, will and must rule the Negro. Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to slavery in many of its substantial forms." In order to validate its position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and aristocracies--the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):