A writer in _The Outlook_ of June 13, 1903, in an article entitled, “Negro Suffrage in the South,” says: “How far do they exclude him (the Negro) in point of fact? In answering this question the reader must note that in three of the States, Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia, a Negro who possesses property amounting in value to $300 and has paid his taxes may vote. He may not be able to read and write, he may not be able to understand the Constitution when it is read to him. But if he has had the industry, the sobriety, the thrift which have enabled him to accumulate taxable property to the amount of $300, he has the ballot. How many Negroes there are in the South who under this provision are admitted to the ballot we have no means of knowing. It has been estimated that the total ownings of Negroes in the Southern States mount up to $300,000,000 worth of personal and real estate. It is officially reported that in Virginia they own one-twenty-sixth of all the land in the State. These facts would seem to indicate that a not inconsiderable number of Negroes are admitted to the ballot in the Southern States under the property qualification. On the other hand, a considerable white population has been disfranchised under this property-qualification clause. We are informed by a Southern correspondent, whose means of acquaintance justify our placing some confidence in his statement, that in Alabama fully fifty thousand white men, under the practical operation of the Constitution, by non-payment of poll-taxes or other clauses, have been disfranchised.” It may also be well to consider the effect of such a penalizing measure on the future of the Negro himself. To adopt it would be to violate the one principle on which the permanent advance of the Negro race must be founded. That is, the recognition, even at this late hour, by the Negro that he must stand on his own merits and is to be left to work out politically, as well as economically, his own future. To adopt it would mislead him into thinking he is still the ward of the nation and is to be supported by it, irrespective of his conduct—an idea to which may be traced a considerable portion of all that has retarded the Negro’s advance in the past. It will tend to divert once more his aim from the paths of industry to which it is being turned by the wisest of his friends. It will engender a new hostility to him on the part of the stronger race, on whose friendship his future welfare must depend.