11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might be all killed in a night. 12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to restore to the Negro his lost power of voting. It will never succeed, but you can see the anxiety it causes us. 13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But kept down they must be. 14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well together. * * * * * Southern belief rarely strays out of this codified expression of thought. Get into converse with a Southerner on the subject of the Negroes, and you will almost always be able to refer his talk to 1 or 6 or 10 or some other paragraph of the foregoing. It is sufficiently pat and parrot-like to be amusing at last. The Negro himself is amused and pained by it. It amounts to this: The Southerner has made the Negro a pair of boots and he says they fit very well. The Negro says they don’t fit. But the Southerner says he’ll risk his salvation on it—he made the boots, and he knows his trade. The Negro, however, has to wear them. Perhaps if it were merely opinion, the idleness of the spoken word, the Southern point of view would merit less attention. Talk might be discounted, as mere talk is discounted by responsible minds. But it has unfortunately a remarkable counterpart in action. It is the concomitant of mob murder and torture. It is expressed not only in narrow and bitter phrase, but in actual flesh twisting; not only in the flames of fanaticism, but in real flames.