Against this no outside power can prevail. That there has been violence is admitted. There has also been brutality in the North. But I do not believe there was a negro voter in the South kept away from the polls by fear of violence in the late election. I believe there were fewer votes miscounted in the South than in the North. Even in those localities where violence once occurred, wiser counsels have prevailed, and reliance is placed on those higher and legitimate and inexorable methods by which the superior race always dominates, and by which intelligence and integrity always resist the domination of ignorance and corruption. If the honest Republicans of the North permit a scheme of federal supervision, based on the assumption of intimidated voters and a false count, they will blunder from the start, for, beginning in error, they will end in worse. This whole matter should be left now with the people, with whom it must be left at last—that people most interested in its honorable settlement. External pressure but irritates and delays. The South has voluntarily laid down the certainty of power which dividing her States would bring, that she might solve this problem in the deliberation and the calmness it demands. She turns away from spoils, knowing that to struggle for them would bring irritation to endanger greater things. She postpones reforms and surrenders economic convictions, that unembarrassed she may deal with this great issue. And she pledges her sacred honor—by all that she has won, and all that she has suffered—that she will settle this problem in such full and exact justice as the finite mind can measure, or finite hands administer. On this pledge she asks the patience and waiting judgment of the world, and especially of the people—her brothers and her kindred—that in passion forced this problem into the keeping of her helpless hands. Shall she have it? Let us see. Was there a pistol shot through the South on election day? Was there a riot? Was there anything to equal the disturbance and arrests in President Harrison’s own city? If so, diligent search has not found it. Where then was the vote suppressed through violence? In the 12,000 election precincts of the South, where was a ballot-box rifled, or a registry list altered? Thirteen Republican congressmen were elected, many of them by majorities so slender that the vote of a single precinct would have changed the result. In West Virginia, with its wild and lawless districts, the governorship hangs on less than three hundred votes, and this very day the governor of Tennessee and his cabinet are passing on a legal question in the casting of twenty-three votes that elects or defeats a congressman. In West Virginia and in Tennessee the law will be applied as impartially and the official vote held as sacred as in New York or Ohio. Where, then, is the wholesale fraud of which complaint is made?