In the first place, let us disembarrass ourselves by discarding all irrelevant and extraneous questions. Putting aside all mere prejudice whatever, whether springing from the Negro’s former condition of servitude or from other causes, let us base our argument on facts and the final issue cannot be doubtful. Whatever prejudice may exist, a constant, firm, and philosophic presentation of the facts of the case must in the end establish the truth, and secure the right remedy. The spirit of civilization must overcome at last, and whatever obstacles it shall encounter, right must eventually triumph. The North deems the pending question merely one of the enforcement or subversion of an elective franchise law; it has never accepted the proposition that it is a great race question on which hinges the preservation of the Union, the security of the people, white and black alike, and the progress of American civilization. Perhaps no clearer or more authoritative exposition of the views held by the North on this question can be found than that set forth in a recent address by Mr. G. W. Cable delivered before the Massachusetts Club of Boston on the 22d of February, 1890. The favor with which it was received by the class to whom it was delivered testifies not the hostility of that class, but the extent to which the question is misunderstood in that section. Mr. Cable, after negativing the Southern idea of the question, declares: “The problem is whether American citizens shall not enjoy equal rights in the choice of their rulers. It is not a question of the Negro’s right to rule. _It is simply a question of their right to choose rulers; and as in reconstruction days they selected more white men for office than men of their own race, they would probably do so now._” This is quoted with approval by even so liberal and well-informed a thinker as the Rev. Henry M. Field, who certainly bears only good-will to the South, as to the rest of mankind. The indorsement of these views by such a man proves that the North absolutely misapprehends the true question which confronts the nation at this time. It has from constant iteration accepted as facts certain statements such as those quoted, and these constitute its premises, on which it bases all its reasoning and all its action. The trouble is that its first premise is fallacious. Its teachers, its preachers, its writers, its orators, its philosophers, its politicians, have with one voice, and that a mighty voice, been for a hundred years instilling into its mind the uncontradicted doctrine that the South brought the Negro here and bound him in slavery; that the South kept the Negro in slavery; that to perpetuate this enormity the South plunged the nation in war, and attempted to destroy the Union; that the South still desires the reëstablishment of slavery, and that meantime it oppresses the Negro, defies the North, and stands a constant menace to the Union.