Second, a small but noisy and demonstrative group, comprising about fifteen per cent of the remainder, who labored under the honest, but erroneous, impression that the best and most effective way to build up a strong Republican party at the South was to draw the color line in the party. In other words, to organize a Republican party to be composed exclusively of white men, to the entire exclusion of colored men. What those men chiefly wanted,--or felt the need of for themselves and their families,--was social recognition by the better element of the white people of their respective localities. They were eager, therefore, to bring about such a condition of things as would make it possible for them to be known as Republicans without subjecting themselves and their families to the risk of being socially ostracized by their white Democratic neighbors. And then again those men believed then, and some of them still believe or profess to believe, that southern Democrats were and are honest and sincere in the declaration that the presence of the colored men in the Republican party prevented southern white men from coming into it. "Draw the race line against the colored man,--organize a white Republican party,--and you will find that thousands of white men who now act with the Democratic party will join the Republicans." Some white Republicans believed that the men by whom these declarations were made were honest and sincere,--and it may be that some of them were,--but it appears not to have occurred to them that if the votes of the colored men were suppressed the minority white vote, unaided and unprotected, would be powerless to prevent the application of methods which would nullify any organized effort on their part. In other words, nothing short of an effective national law, to protect the weak against the strong and the minority of the whites against the aggressive assaults of the majority of that race, would enable the minority of the whites to make their power and influence effective and potential; and even then it could be effectively done only in cooeperation with the blacks. Then again, they seemed to have lost sight of the fact,--or perhaps they did not know it to be a fact,--that many leading southern Democrats are insincere in their declarations upon the so-called race question. They keep that question before the public for political and party reasons only, because they find it to be the most effective weapon they can use to hold the white men in political subjection. The effort, therefore, to build up a "white" Republican party at the South has had a tendency, under existing circumstances, to discourage a strong Republican organization in that section. But, even if it were possible for such an organization to have a potential existence, it could not be otherwise than ephemeral, because it would be wholly out of harmony with the fundamental principles and doctrines of the national organization whose name it had appropriated. It would be in