What if the negroes were ignorant and easily led; give them the vote and they would swiftly acquire learning and strength of character. People talked as if the ballot box was a cure-all; as if there was a sort of magic in it; as if merely to handle it was salvation; without it, said they, man is still a slave and can never be expected to improve; nor can the community rise while he is “disfranchised” as they expressed it; but with the ballot in hand he will at once mount to meet his opportunities. This arrant nonsense has been recently made familiar to us by the woman suffragists and need not be further recapitulated. The negroes were thereupon invited to go through all the performances in which the white masses had long been accustomed to display themselves; and, as a Chinaman once said, to exercise their ignorance. They, and especially the fools and idlers among them, responded with alacrity. They talked politics at great length; those who could read fed their minds with newspaper rubbish; they attended political meetings addressed by frothy orators and office seekers just as many white people do, and like them they fell under the leadership of designing demagogues some of whom speedily learned to be competent rivals in rascality to many white politicians. Of course the colored peoples’ political orators were of a new crop; the old-fashioned pretentious white humbugs who had deceived and tongue lashed the southern people into a heartless and hopeless insurrection were out of the running, or, driven to the side of the dismayed and discouraged conservatives, stood hungrily envying the luck of their late servants. In vain the better class of the whites protested against the prospect of being squeezed by this new and ignorant democracy out of whatever the war had left them; their protests were received with derision by the radical and enlightened North. They and their minority of conservative northern sympathizers were stigmatized as would-be autocrats, aristocrats, oppressors of the poor; old time Bourbons unable to grasp new ideas; this and that piece of wisdom had not “dawned” on them; with their antiquated brains they could not realize the beauty and power of true democracy carried to the limit, etc. The controversy between the southern whites and the new colored democracy was given great prominence in excited political discussions all over the country; in most states the general elections were made to turn upon this question; all the sentimental “highbrows” and the same class of emotionalists and enthusiasts who are now advocating woman suffrage were then supporting negro suffrage; to oppose it was to be ignorant or antiquated. The friends of unlimited suffrage carried state after state in the North and West by majorities far exceeding those since recorded in favor of woman suffrage, and the negro was by Federal authority given the vote in every southern state.