What, to begin with, is the answer of the South to the former? It is familiar to us all and would seem to be the nearly unanimous voice of the Southern people. The Negro, they say, is ignorant, lazy and vicious. Slavery, so far as its effect on the slave is concerned, was a beneficent institution, raising him from his previous savagery to a plane of humble usefulness. There, however, his incurable inferiority destines him forever to remain. This, the South insists she has settled in wisdom and kindliness. The North, so runs her speech, misunderstanding the South and the Negro, unjustly forced on the Civil war, to compel her to change her domestic institutions. But that attempt, foredoomed to failure, has resulted in nothing more than the abolition of slavery, and a cruel loss of life and property, partly compensated for by the consequent revelation of her boundless resources of courage, loyalty and united resolve. Slavery, while a Southern institution, was not a bond of perfect union; but upon the platform of black inferiority and white domination, every Southern man has his foot squarely planted. Her answer, therefore, to all criticism is to point with pride to the solid South. How often are we called upon to see with pain and wonder that opinions, theories, even the mind itself is shaped by actions. Nature, aiming at preservation of life, is quick to heal all possible wounds, to reconcile warring impulses, to gloss and beautify deformities, and even to conceal dangers and snares. She gives men language to justify their misdeeds, teaches them how to embalm their errors in the secretion of their intellects, and even preserves the lying epitaphs which they inscribe over the remains of their vanity and pride. To change an opinion, it is necessary commonly to change a course of action, and until the life of the South changes, there seems no reasonable expectation that her opinions will change. Disfranchisement is but a symptom of the diseased Southern body politic, and who can tell whether the surgeon’s knife will not reach the sources of life itself in seeking for a cure. Sufficient then to herself,—wholly insufficient, false, and cruel to us, is this answer. If there were but these two parties to the cause, there would be no need to consider it. There remains, however, the still hesitating, ever-divided public opinion of the North—now the judge in the Freedmen’s case. It is fitting that in her court, our replication should be boldly made. There we proclaim that the South is not doing justice to colored men.