The attempt to establish manhood suffrage in the South by means of the Fifteenth Amendment was a crime. The amendment itself is founded upon a palpably false conception. In effect it provides that the right of colored citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any state. It amounts to a solemn declaration that there are no inferior races and that a voter does not need intelligence. It proposes to establish a government to be called civilized where the ignorant shall govern the intelligent; the inferior shall govern the superior; poverty shall rule wealth; the pyramid shall stand on its apex. It turns the democratic movement into a backward march; assuming to speak for democracy, it declares it an enemy of civilization; it flouts the wisdom of science; it overrules the Creator, who created five races of men fundamentally different in capacity. To attempt this was a crime and not the less but the more so because done through a sham legality. As already shown in these pages, a law passed in contravention of civilization, in opposition to the canons of Society is no law, and therefore the old statutes authorizing the tortures of the Inquisition, the execution of witches and the rendition by free peoples of fugitive slaves to their masters were illegal and void, and disobedience thereto was a virtue. The Abolitionists were fond of denouncing the Constitution as a covenant with hell; the Fifteenth Amendment was a compact with rascality, entered into at the command of passion and party advantage rather than of cool reason and patriotism. It was possible because the long régime of political corruption had demoralized the best of the party leaders; they had grown accustomed to quackery and demagogism and a corrupt use of the spoils of office to control elections and government, and they found it easy to apply these means to the problem of the government of the conquered Southern States, with the object of party gain. But they never would have dared to do the deed had the way not been first prepared by the spread of the false doctrine that every man has a natural right to a vote. Thus once more we have the lesson of the ultimate costliness of lying and false logic.