The convention just adjourned is the third of its kind in the history of the South, or of the world, the first being the Mississippi convention of 1890, the second, the South Carolina convention of 1895. These facts illustrate the tendency of the South, especially the Gulf States, to move in unison in all legislation affecting their colored citizens. The object of these conventions has been the disfranchisement of the colored people, so far as it could be done consistently with the 15th amendment, and, at the same time preserve the right as far as possible to white men. In some parts of the country, many intelligent men who have lived only in an atmosphere of liberty and its unbroken traditions, have believed that the suffrage movement in the South was solely in the interest of clean politics and an intelligent electorate, but if the record just made by the Louisiana constitutional architects does not convince them that they have been mistaken, then they would not change their opinion though one should rise from the dead. There is an important bit of history back of the present result. Two years ago the legislature submitted to the people an amendment limiting the right of the ballot by an educational and property test. That proposition was buried beneath a mountain of votes. This, perhaps, was not a fair test of the public sentiment in the question presented, for the reason that the amendment contained a vicious clause, empowering the forthcoming legislature to alter the law in its discretion, but it is undoubtedly true that no amendment conditioning the suffrage upon education and property could pass the ordeal of a popular vote. The politicians, however, were not to be discouraged by this defeat, and accordingly they passed through the legislature the bill which called the recent convention into being and made its results final without popular ratification. So far as the enlightened sentiment of the state was concerned, there was undoubtedly, a strong desire for some change in the suffrage laws to prevent the corruption which ignorance made easy, and the fraud and violence which for years had filled law-respecting citizens with shame and humiliation. Vitally connected with the suffrage, was the subject of popular education; there was also the felt need of reforming the judiciary system. After long weeks of painful travail, the suffrage committee presented an ordinance that filled the state with amazement, and was so palpably unconstitutional and so grotesquely absurd that according to United States Senator McEnery, it was regarded in Washington as a "joke." The committee quailed before the storm of popular indignation, and re-committed the ordinance to the suffrage committee. Yet the law which was finally passed, though lopped of some of its worst excrescences, is the same in principle, and will work out nearly the same results as the first proposition. It requires:--