I not only reject it because it bears upon its face the marks of being a fraud, a make-shift for a malignant purpose, but because it has sprung upon the country simultaneously, and in manifest co-operation with a declared purpose and a well-known effort, and I may say a fixed determination to degrade the Negro by judicial decisions, by legislative enactments, by repealing all laws for the protection of the ballot, by drawing the colour line in all railroad cars and stations and in all other public places in the South, thus to pave the way to a final consummation which is nothing less than the Negro’s entire disenfranchisement as an American citizen. It is to this great end that all the charges and complaints against the Negro are directed and are made to converge. This is and has been from first to last the grand and all-commanding object in view. It is a part of a well-devised reactionary movement against the Negro as a citizen. The old master class are wise in their day and generation. They know if they can once divest the Negro of the elective franchise and nullify his citizenship, the partition wall between him and slavery will no longer exist, and no man can tell where the reaction will stop. THE ATTACK LESS UPON CRIME THAN COLOUR. Again, I do not believe it, and deny it, because the charge is not so much against the crime itself, as against the colour of the people alleged to be guilty of it. Slavery itself, you will remember, was a system of unmitigated, legalised outrage upon black women of the South, and no white man was ever shot, burned or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him at this point.