we have seen, has succeeded most thoroughly in depriving the Negro in its midst of any voice in its governments and it has shut him out of state offices, and now thanks to President Taft, has at last succeeded in depriving him of holding federal office in its midst likewise. But there yet remains to the Southern colored man a tattered and bedraggled remnant of his citizenship in that section, if indeed even that shall be left to him four years hence. I refer to his quadrennial appearance as a delegate in Republican National Conventions, where for a brief hour he enjoys the spotlight importance of a political supernumerary on the party stage. Since 1884, there has been an increasing inclination among Republican leaders to reduce the representation of the party's Southern wing in National Conventions to a number proportioned to the size of its vote on election day. But the leaders have not yet got their courage to the sticking point to tackle this proposition, perhaps because they have not been willing to tackle the prior one of a reduction of Southern representation in Congress, and perhaps for other good and sufficient considerations of an emergency character, they have allowed the matter to drift and to let for the time being well enough alone. But whatever has been the motive of that party for its policy of inactivity and indecision on this question heretofore, there are not wanting signs of a change of that policy presently into one of activity and decision. It seems probable that reduction of representation of its Southern wing in its National Conventions will occupy a prominent place on the program of Republican reorganization within the next four years. That party in a half dozen Southern States has been called in derision by its enemies a "ghost party" and a "phantom party." And such it is in reality. It is dead and I do not believe that its corpse can ever be galvanized into life again. There are decomposing parts of it known as "Regulars" and "Lily Whites," stricken both with the microbes of death, obscenely alive with the maggots of place-hunters. It is powerless to dissolve the solid South and to restore to that section bi-party in place of one-party governments. It is wholly incapable of attracting Southern whites in sufficient numbers to raise it to the rank of a party of opposition, or to give to it the barest chance of achieving success at the polls. Its very name is a political bugaboo and makes it a party impossibility in those states. Since 1876, rather than utilize it as a party of opposition, the Southern whites have preserved their sectional solidity and one-party governments, notwithstanding the fact that many of their more enlightened and far seeing men have felt that such a course is bad for their section as it would be bad for any group of states, North, East or West in the Union.