But what of the other danger? Can we risk that to avoid the first? I am sure we cannot. The very worst thing that could happen to the South is to have her white vote divided into factions, and each faction bidding for the negro who holds the balance of power. What is this negro vote? In every southern State it is considerable, and I fear it is increasing. It is alien, being separated by racial differences that are deep and permanent. It is ignorant—easily deluded or betrayed. It is impulsive—lashed by a word into violence. It is purchasable, having the incentive of poverty and cupidity, and the restraint of neither pride nor conviction. It can never be merged through logical or orderly currents into either of two parties, if two should present themselves. We cannot be rid of it. There it is, a vast mass of impulsive, ignorant and purchasable votes. With no factions between which to swing it has no play or dislocation; but thrown from one faction to another it is the loosed cannon on the storm-tossed ship. There is no community that would deliberately tempt this danger; no social or political fabric that could stand its strain. The Tweed ring, backed by a similar and less irresponsible following than a shrewd clique could rally and control in every southern State, and daring less of plunder and insolence than that following would sanction or support, blotted out party lines in New York, and made its intelligence and integrity as solid as the South ever was. Party lines were promptly recast because New York had to deal with the vicious, who once punished may be trusted to sulk in quiet while their wounds heal. We deal with the ignorant, that scourged from power to-day, may be deluded to-morrow into assaulting the very position from which they have been lashed. Never did robbers find followers more to their mind than the emancipated slaves of reconstruction days. Ignorant and confiding, they could be committed to any excess, led to any outrage. Deep as was the degradation to which these sovereign States were carried, and heavy as is the burden they left on this impoverished people, it was only when the white race, rallying from the graves of its dead and the ashes of its homes, closed its decimated ranks, and fronting federal bayonets, and defying federal power, stood like a stone wall before the uttermost temples of its liberty and credit, and the hideous drama closed, that the miserable assault was checked. Shall those ranks be broken while the danger still threatens?