That the present condition of the negro in the Southern states is superior to the African in his native lair, or his descendants in other emancipation countries, cannot be doubted. But it should not be forgotten, that whatever improvement there may be, is due to the training of a superior race of white men, for many generations, and since emancipation, to the facilities for education, morally, intellectually, and industrially. The Southern white man, under normal conditions, in the absence of excitement and irritating circumstances, is the negro’s best friend. He can here work out his destiny, slowly, as natural law moves—through generations, and he will reach his goal, whether it be high or low, and no man should obstruct, or deny him this. It is only insisted that he is not yet fitted for the elective franchise unrestricted—a right, as jurists hold, not springing out of man’s nature, but a civil right to be conferred by the state upon those most capable of its intelligent exercise. Nor is it conferred by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution; those amendments are merely limitations upon the states preventing them from enacting a law excluding negroes from voting, because they are negroes. They do not prevent restrictions upon voting, if reasonable, and applied to both races. About one-fourth of the area of the United States is directly afflicted with this race problem, and while the people of the South are more interested in its wise management than the people of other states, yet every patriot and every business man looking forward to that high destiny which awaits us as a nation, must feel concerned for its proper solution. The matter should be put upon a higher plane than party politics. Investments and rapidly developing industries in the South would be retarded by partisan agitation, and business men, acting through their organizations, should seek to avert it. It is believed that all of the Southern states had, at the time of the adoption of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, universal suffrage fixed in their constitutions, and since the legislatures could not restrict suffrage under the old constitutions, the effect of those amendments, was to suddenly enfranchise ex-slaves, while most of their former owners were disfranchised for participation in rebellion. The latter was not unnatural, but the former was, and must stand in history as the extreme limit to which partisan and fanatical passions have carried men. The most rapacious exactions of pecuniary indemnity, or the stripping the conquered of the very soil of their fathers, are in comparison trifling inconveniences. That one great enlightened section of the white race, was willing to submerge another great section of its own race, beneath a sea of African ex-slaves, has a parallel only in England’s calling to its aid “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”