In the face of this showing, let me quote from an editorial in the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the most powerful and a usually conservative journal, charging that the negro vote is suppressed and miscounted. It says: “The trouble is, the blacks will not fight for themselves. White men, or Indians, situated as the negroes, would have made the rivers of the South run red with blood before they would submit to the usurpations and wrongs with which the black passively endure. Oppressed by generations of slavery, the negroes are non-combatants. They will not shoot and burn for their rights.” Mark the unspeakable infamy of this suggestion. The “trouble” is that the negroes will not rise and shoot and burn. Not the “mercy” is that they do not—but the “mercy” is that they will not massacre and begin the strife that would repeat the horrors of Hayti in the various States of this Republic. Burn and shoot for what? That they may vote in Georgia, where in front of me in the line stood a negro, whose place was as sacred as mine, and whose vote as safely counted? That they may vote in the thirteen districts in which they have elected their congressmen?—in the 320 counties in which they have elected their representatives, and in old Virginia, where they came within 1400 votes of carrying the State? As the 60,000 Virginia negroes who did vote did so in admitted peace and safety, where was the violence that prevented the needed 1400 from leaving their fields, coming to the ballot-box, and giving the State to the Republicans? And yet slavery itself, in which the selling of a child from its mother’s arms and a wife from her husband was permitted, never brought into reputable print so villainous a suggestion as this, leveled by a knave at a political condition which he views from afar, and which it is proved does not exist. To pass by the man who wrote these words, how shall we judge the temper of a community in which they are applauded? Are these men blood of our blood that they permit such things to go unchallenged? Better that they had refused us parole at Appomattox and had confiscated the ruins of our homes, than twenty years later to bring us under the dominion of such passion as this. Hear another witness, General Sherman, not in hot speech but in cold print: “The negro must be allowed to vote, and his vote must be counted, otherwise, so sure as there is a God in heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions. Should the negro strike that blow, in seeming justice, there will be millions to assist them.”