Last year, at this time, we were confronted with an unusual and somewhat alarming state of facts. We stood at the gateway of a new and strange administration. After wandering about during twenty-four years, seeking rest and finding none, often hungry and sometimes thirsty, and, though not feeding swine or eating husks, yet not unfrequently found in very low places and wasting the substance of the national family, our prodigal Democratic son, with one tremendous effort of will, returned to the White House, and was received with every demonstration of parental joy and gladness. Of course this did not take place without a murmur of complaint and disapproval. There was an elder brother here as elsewhere; one who had remained at home, worked the old farm, kept the fences in repair; one who had done his duty and made things in the old house comfortable and pleasant generally. Indeed, but for his elder brother, the Republican party, the house would have been broken up, the whole family turned out of doors and scattered in poverty and destitution. It was natural, therefore, when this elder brother saw the great doings at the White House one year ago, when he heard the music and saw the dancing, and learned what it was all about, he was not over well pleased, and thought his father not only soft-hearted, but a little soft-headed, and a trifle ungrateful, if not crazy withal. But elder brothers, you know, are usually reasonable and patient, and are generally quite submissive to parental authority, and though he knew the bad character of the young truant who had now come home, he hoped he had reformed. How far this cheerful and patient hope has been justified by one year of this administration I will not now stop to say; I may, however, remark, as a prelude to what I shall hereafter say, that as far as the colored people of the country are concerned, their condition seems no better and not much worse than under previous administrations. Lynch law, violence, and murder have gone on about the same as formerly, and without the least show of Federal interference or popular rebuke. The Constitution has been openly violated with the usual impunity, and the colored vote has been as completely nullified, suppressed, and scouted as if the fifteenth amendment formed no part of the Constitution, and as if every colored citizen of the South had been struck dead by lightning or blown to atoms by dynamite. There have also been the usual number of outrages committed against the civil rights of colored citizens on highways and by-ways, by land and by water, and the courts of the country, under the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, have shown the same disposition to punish the innocent and shield the guilty, as during the presidency of Mr. Arthur. Perhaps colored men have fared a little worse, so far as office-holding is concerned. In some of the Departments, I am sorry to say, there have