Every Southern state has virtually by one device or another, since the adoption of the 14th and 15th amendments, denied to its colored citizens the right to vote. This was first done by the shot-gun method, which gave place in time to fraudulent manipulations of electoral returns, and this in turn to "grandfather" and "understanding clauses" administered by prejudiced registration boards in those states which have revised their constitutions. Says Professor Dunning in an article on "The Undoing of Reconstruction" in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1901: "With the enactment of these constitutional amendments by the various states, the political equality of the Negro is becoming extinct in law as it has long been in fact, and the undoing of reconstruction is nearing completion." Now this statement is exactly true. The South has everywhere nullified in practice the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. It denies to black men the right to vote, but it counts at the same time those same black men in the apportionment of its representatives. The present serf power therefore, enjoys to-day a right far greater than that enjoyed by the old slave power, for it counts five of its disfranchised black citizens not as three but as five free men. It has achieved the extraordinary feat of eating its political cake and keeping it at the same time. In South Carolina, for example, where the blacks outnumber the whites by 224,326, and in Mississippi where the colored population is in excess of the white by 263,640, "the influence of the Negroes in political affairs," as put by Prof. Dunning, "is nil." And this is substantially true of almost everyone of the old slave states whether they have or have not revised their constitutions. Says Prof. DuBois: "To-day the black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended, as to who shall make the laws and how they shall be made. It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to get law-makers in some states even to listen to the respectful presentation of the black side of a current controversy."