The result of this measure in the District of Columbia was that unscrupulous politicians gained strong support from needy and ignorant voters of all colours. Public money was spent recklessly; taxation became oppressive; and the public debt grew to alarming size. On June 17, 1874, when Grant was President and each branch of Congress was more than two-thirds Republican, the House of Representatives voted, ten to one, in favour of taking away the suffrage, not only from the blacks who had received it seven years before, but even from the whites who had exercised it since the beginning of the century. All local government was entrusted to three commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no opposition; for the arrangement seemed only temporary. It proved permanent. Even taxation without representation has been thought better than negro suffrage; and the citizens of the national capital remain in 1899 without any voice in their own municipal government. The problem has been still more difficult in those eleven States which had to accept negro suffrage, in or after 1867, as a condition of restoration to the Union. The extension of franchise made in all the States by the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, seemed such a blessing to the Republicans that Frederick Douglass was much censured for holding that it might possibly have been attained without special supernatural assistance. It soon became plain, however, that Congress ought to have given the spelling-book earlier than the ballot. The suffrage proved no protection to the freedman; for his white neighbours found that he could be more easily intimidated than educated. Congress tried to prevent murder of coloured voters by having the polls guarded by Federal troops and the elections supervised by United States marshals. The _Habeas Corpus_ Act was suspended by President Grant in districts where the blacks outnumbered the whites. It was hard to see what liberty had gained. The negro's worst enemies were his own candidates. They had enormous majorities in South Carolina; and there, as Blaine admits, they "brought shame upon the Republican party," "and thus wrought for the cause of free government and equal suffrage in the South incalculable harm." Between 1868 and 1872 they added ten millions by wanton extravagance to the State debt. Large sums were stolen; taxes rose to six per cent.; and land was assessed far above its value, with the avowed purpose of taking it away from the whites. Such management was agreed at a public meeting of coloured voters under Federal protection, in Charleston, in 1874, to have "ruined our people and disgraced our State." Negro suffrage was declared by the New York Evening Post to have resulted in "organising the ignorance and poverty of the State against its property and intelligence."