⁴ The requirement that the voter be able to read (or write) _and_ interpret satisfactorily, in the Virginia registration requirement before Jan. 1, 1904, is an advance upon the earlier clauses, which left the alternative. I am not sure but that it reappears in the Maryland law not yet in operation. It is an interesting fact that it was _Senator Daniels of Virginia_ who once called the attention of the Senate to the injustice done the South by Senator Spooner’s assertion that voters were, without alternative, required to interpret passages from the Constitutions. Yet disfranchisement for ignorance, for thriftlessness, and vice all together are acknowledged to be insufficient, and resort must be had again to manipulation, juggling, and confessed dishonesty. Rev. Edgar Gardiner Murphy, Executive Secretary of the Southern Education Board, a distinguished witness, testifying against interest, says: "The instrument of discrimination has been found in the discretionary powers lodged in the board of registrars, by which worthy Negro men, fairly meeting every test of suffrage have been excluded from registration."(?) Where the fact is so freely admitted, proof seems wasted, yet abundant corroboration may easily be had⁵. ⁵ The following clipping from the Baltimore American, I cannot refrain from reading:— "In the recent election the democratic judges of election in many of the counties proved that they were unable even to count ballots properly marked, and when it came to putting a reasonable interpretation on the intention of a voter they were either wholly ignorant or wholly dishonest. It is perfectly safe to say that not one-third of the democratic judges who served at the Maryland election of last week could themselves give an intelligent interpretation of any section in the Constitution. Many of them do not even know what the Constitution is, and the man who suggested that they would take it to be a new kind of drink did not overshoot the mark. Fine professors of constitutional history these men would make!" The fact as well as the extent of disfranchisement is revealed by the statistical summaries:— *STATISTICAL SUMMARIES*