Entrenched in the South to-day is an aristocracy based on race. The whole tendency of things down there is to de-citizenize the blacks, to reduce them to a state of permanent political and industrial subordination to the whites. This is aristocratizing the republic with a vengeance. For with the right to vote, the right to a voice in making the laws, denied to any class of people in an industrial republic like ours, such class must go from bad to worse in the struggle for bread, for existence, in competition with more favored classes. It does more: it reduces the efficiency of such a class as a producer of wealth not alone in respect to itself, but in respect to the section in which it lives as well. For whatever degrades and wrongs such a class degrades and wrongs the community and the country of which it forms a part. And there is no help for it, for such is the natural law of retribution which no "understanding" and "grandfather clauses" and registration boards, however adroitly devised, can in the long run possibly evade or nullify. This then is the deplorable economic situation with regard to whites and blacks alike in the Southern states, as a direct consequence of the undoing of the 14th and the 15th amendments to the Constitution by those States. The degradation of their black labor will ultimate in the degradation of their white labor also. In fact, the disfranchisement of the blacks operates practically everywhere down there as a disfranchisement of the great body of the whites likewise. For disuse of a power, whether physical or political, begets in time disinclination and then incapacity for exercising the same. The right to vote, under present political conditions which prevail throughout that section, is, as a matter of fact, exercised but by a small minority of the whites only. The total vote, for example, cast for representatives in Southern congressional districts is surprisingly slight in comparison with that cast in Northern congressional districts. The same is true of the vote for presidential electors, and for the executive, legislative and judicial officers of the various southern states for that matter. A handful of ruling whites, and that not of the best class as in antebellum times, casts to-day the entire vote of that section as represented by all of its black and a large majority of its white citizens, at national and state elections.