The process of Southern political solidification, partially suspended for a few years, resumed promptly after 1876 all of its natural functions and its one party governments. Since that time legislation hostile to the Negro has increased enormously in that section. Its old reconstructed State Constitutions have been one by one revised most favorably to the whites and most unfavorably and unjustly for the blacks. For what with grandfather and understanding clauses, educational and property qualifications, partisan registration boards and election supervisors and white primaries, the great majority of the colored people have been excluded from the electorate, from any voice in the Government, while the vote of the small minority who are included in the electorate has been reduced to a nullity by their exclusion from the white primaries. The states which have thus revised their constitutions have thereby effected the practical disfranchisement of their entire colored population. While they have done this they have managed at the same time to leave the ballot in the hands of every white man. Under such unequal conditions, the white man is immune from legislation and administration unfriendly to his class, while the black man is exposed to the aggressions of this favored class; either directly through mobs or indirectly through hostile legislation and administration, which fix upon him the brand of a caste whose members have no rights in Southern society which white men are bound to respect. Such social injustice and political inequality as exist between the races in the South are bad for the whites as they are bad for the blacks--are very bad for their collective interests and for the National interests of the great industrial democracy of which they form a part. Is it astonishing then that under such circumstances there have sprung up and flourish in the South the peonage and convict lease systems, the plantation lease and credit systems, contract labor and "Jim Crow" laws, lynching and the inequitable distribution of the public school funds between the races? For the Southern white man, and he is not different from any other white man or black man either for that matter who possesses irresponsible power over others, regulates his conduct toward the Negro in his midst by the law of might, which allows him with a good conscience to do to the Negro whatever he wants to do, and to take from him whatever he wants to take whether life or liberty, while it forbids his victim to do what he wants to do; or to retain what belongs to him as an American citizen whether it be his life or his liberty--that is, to do so by identically the same means which white men use to retain what belongs to them under similar circumstances.