In 1865, when the Negro was set free, he held without a rival the entire field of industrial labor throughout the South. Ninety-five per cent. of all the industrial work of the Southern States was in his hands. And he was fully competent to do it. Every adult was either a skilled laborer or a trained mechanic. It was the fallacious teaching of equality which deluded him into dropping the substance for the shadow. To-day their wisest leader is trying to emulate his great teacher, Armstrong, and lead them back to the field which they so carelessly abandoned. Men who are the equals of others do not go about continually asserting it. They show their equality by the fruits of their intellect and character. Among the whites, the poor class are not always haranguing and adopting resolutions as to their equality with the other classes, any more than are the well-to-do class always insisting upon their equality with the wealthy class. They know that they are equal, if not superior, and do not feel continually called on to assert it offensively. The same may be said about the best educated, best behaved, and most worthy among the Negroes. It is the blatant demagogue and “mouthy” Negro—a term that was well known during the period of slavery—who is mainly heard on this subject. Happily for the Negroes, the major portion of them have retired from the struggle for political power, and, except when excited by agitators, live harmoniously enough with the whites; and the industrious element are saving, and are building themselves homes. While, however, the body of the Negro race are going about their business in good-humored content, generally in good fellowship with the people on whose friendship they are most dependent, the so-called “leaders” and their so-called “friends” are spending their time in stirring them up, adopting lurid resolutions, asserting their equality and calling on everybody outside of the South to help them establish it. The phrase usually employed is that the Negro is “robbed of his vote,” this formula being equally applied whether he is restrained from voting by the unlawful act of one or more individuals or by the most solemn act that a people can perform—the provision of a duly ordained constitution. It may be well, at the outset of the discussion of this matter, to call attention to a fact somewhat generally overlooked: that the right to vote is not an inherent right. It is a privilege conferred by positive enactment on those citizens possessed of certain specified qualifications.