But I show you _another_ picture. It carries us back a few years. The Legislature of South Carolina is in session. Its members are mostly black men. They have generally no property and pay no taxes, yet they have taxed that already impoverished State to the verge of destruction, not for public improvement, but to lavish it upon themselves, in suppers, wines, personal perquisites, in jobs and in railroad schemes. No more scandalous or reckless plundering of a public treasury has ever been practiced in America, and that is saying a great deal. Why is this little handful of mock legislators allowed to do this? Why do not the people rush in upon them and hurl them from the places they so dishonor? Why? Simply because there stands as a guard a file of United States soldiers—not themselves sufficient in numbers to be formidable, but representing the National Government, and to touch them is to touch it. The South is indignant, determined, and do you wonder? The troops are now gone, the black legislators are dispersed and white taxpayers are in their places; and rising above all other considerations is the purpose of these taxpayers that, at whatever cost, and by whatever needed methods, be it by tissue ballots or by shotguns, those irresponsible plunderers shall never come back again into power. You blame them; but I fear you would do the same yourselves under like provocation. If the General Government, by means of a bloody war, should subdue the Western States, and then enfranchise in any one State enough Indians to outvote the whites, and those Indians should re-enact the plunderings of the Columbia Legislature, how long would the West bear it? I suspect that very quickly every Indian would be converted into a good Indian; but it would be in the Western sense—he would be a dead Indian. Brethren of the North, make the case your own. Put yourself in your Southern brother’s place, and judge him by your own impulses. What, then, is the true remedy for this great evil? To answer this we must honestly consider what the real evil is. These South Carolina taxpayers do not crush these black voters because they are black. They would do the same to the “poor whites” if they, having the numerical force, should enact the same wrongs. Nor is it because they are Republicans. It would be the same if they called themselves Democrats and did the same things. The trouble, therefore, is not with the man’s color or party, but with the man himself—with his ignorance, his degradation and his facility in being used as the tool of designing men. _The remedy, then, is not to change his color or his party, but his character._ All other remedies are delusive, and it is a national folly and crime to tamper longer with them. We have tried them; and to try them over again will be but to swing like a pendulum between the soldiers in front of the State house and the bulldozers at the elections. It is a shame and a grievous wrong to leave matters as they are. It is a