And yet the Negro Question is still the great American Question. Perhaps it is with questions like this as with the movements of a battle; those at a distance see them more clearly than those in the thick of action. The intelligent Englishman or Frenchman will tell you in an instant that our great problem is the negro question—the political, as dependent on the social and moral condition of the freedmen. With a population as large as that of the colonies at the Revolution, with the full privileges of American citizens theirs by constitutional right, they hold in their hands—the very hands but recently manacled in cruel and degrading bondage—the balance of political power in the nation. As parties are now divided, the supremacy of one or the other depends on the negro vote; and whether the negro vote shall be the vote _of_ the negro, or merely the vote _by_ the negro, will depend on the degree of manhood he reaches through his social and moral condition. The Southern Solution. One party in the South, not including the best elements of Southern society, but for the present the dominant one, has already matured and avowed its solution of the problem. “The negro,” they say, “belongs to a race constitutionally and forever inferior—a race foreordained to serve in some capacity the superior white race. You have declared by law that he shall not be a chattel; we are determined that he shall not be more than a serf. Rule over us he shall not; rule with us he shall not; if he must vote, he shall vote as we bid him; by all the methods usually employed for that end wherever caste prevails, by compulsory ignorance, by superstition, by terrorism, by fraud, when necessary by force, he shall be compelled to stay in his place as a member of a subject, an abject race.” There are others—and it must not be ignored that among them are some of the leaders of opinion at the South—whose language is less violent, and whose measures are less threatening, but whose end is substantially the same. They are willing, possibly I should say desirous, to better the condition of the negro, so far as to make him a better laborer, a more thrifty and useful factor in political economy, a more honest man and a more devout Christian, but with stringent limitations to his social and political ambition. They favor education, but an education so controlled by the superior race, and so differenced from the education given to the children of this race, that it shall beget no dangerous and revolutionary aspirations. These men favor religion for the blacks—but such a religion as shall keep them occupied with emotional fervors and boisterous bodily exercises, not such as shall encourage thoughtful study of truth in God’s word and works. The Christian Solution.