as the voters of the North have shown. It is not true-with whatever frequency or confidence the assertion may have been madethat the colored race of the South deliberately or consciously sustained leaders or public officers who were found guilty of dishonest conduct or corrupt practices. Such leaders and officers were deprived of office and power. From 1873 till 1876, when political power was violently wrested from them, it is the truth of history that there was at the South a steady progress toward good government, purity of administration, reform of abuses, and the choice of capable and honest public officers, in those States in which the colored race had most complete control. There were here, as there are in all communities, sham reformers. At periods of special excitement, or under peculiar influences and circumstances, the reform movement was checked, and corrupt and dishonored leaders seemed for a time to regain power. But such reverses were overcome, and in 1876 those who had most conspicuously shown their ability and courage in the work of reform were in substantial control of the political power of the colored race. In South Carolina, where perhaps official corruption had been greatest, the progress of reform had been such as to compel the acknowledgment, by those who had most violently denounced colored suffrage, that the best assurance of good government in the future lay in the continuance of the power of those who were then successfully working out, through the political party supported by the colored vote, the correction of public abuses.

This condition of affairs, it is to be remembered, was the result solely of the movement for reform within the political party which owed its power mainly to the colored race. The reforms accomplished were demanded and supported by the colored voters. The reform leaders were chosen and sustained in their work by the sympathy and approval of a vast majority of that class of voters. If, as was the fact in the crusade against corruption in New York, party lines could have been disregarded; if the white minority had looked only to securing the best means for reform and good government, the reform movement would have advanced to complete success without serious hindrance or delay. Such coöperation would have been welcomed by the colored race. A better agency for peaceful and permanent reform was never presented. The colored race by nature and habit were mild, peaceful, order-loving, teachable, patient, and religious. Taught by such influences and methods as are made use of in other States, this race would have yielded to

the sway of reason and justice in their political conduct, far more readily than did the masses through which for a time corrupt leaders and public officers maintained their power in New York. The work of maintaining good government without the aid and with the hostility of the greater part of the class possessing property and education must always be extremely difficult. No people or race that has shown itself able, under such conditions, to establish wise and liberal constitutions and laws, to set in successful operation the great agencies which produce and uphold our best civilization, and, when attacked and wellnigh overcome by official corruption and profligacy, to defeat and destroy this enemy, and to restore the rule of public integrity and honor, is without the very highest title to exercise the rights and assume the duties of self-government. This title the colored race earned by their conduct from 1868 to 1876.

The fact of the present suppression and overthrow of colored suffrage at the South is now made the ground of the argument that the race was not equal to the duties of self-government. It is said that every people worthy of freedom and self-government will have freedom and self-government. It is said that the inability of a people to cope, in physical and material resources, with its enemies, is proof that such a people is not entitled to retain its political power. Such conclusions are as illogical as they are immoral. Under the principles of our Government and of all just government, rights are not dependent on numbers or physical strength or material resources. The right to vote, and to have that vote honestly counted-the right to hold and exercise the political power conferred by a majority of the votes when honestly counted-these are rights, under our Government, totally independent of the power or wealth or education of the voters. If at any time or in any place these rights are denied or defeated, there the most characteristic principle of our political system is dishonored. Nor is it an answer to this to say-even if the statement were true in any sense -that better government has been secured by the defeat of the will of a majority of the voters. In the first place, there can be no legitimate State government, good or bad, under our system, which does not derive its title from the actual legal result of the votes cast. A government otherwise derived is tainted by an original and incurable vice. In the next place, no government, however wise and pure in administration, is worth the price of a violation of the first principles upon which all governments, under our system, must rest. To hold otherwise is to make government dependent

for its sanction, not on the consent of the governed nor on the will of the majority, but on the consent and will of any number or combination of persons who may chance to possess the preponderance of physical strength and resources.

The present political supremacy of the white race in at least five of the Southern States is the result of the violent exclusion or fraudulent suppression of the colored vote. No honest and wellinformed man will question this. In South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the result has been reached by a system of deliberate, organized violence in all its forms, supplemented and crowned by the most daring and stupendous election frauds. It is an intolerable affront to every sentiment of humanity or dictate of justice, to argue that any results secured by such means are less detestable than the atrocities and crimes by which they were wrought. Whoever prevents any lawful voter from casting his vote, or constrains him to cast it contrary to his will, or deprives it, when cast, of its equal share in determining the result of the election, is guilty of a palpable and vulgar fraud. The defense of such fraud, by a reference to any results which may follow, is a specimen of degrading Jesuitism.

What morality and reason thus affirm, experience confirms. The only serious menace to the prosperity, unity, and life of the nation has proceeded directly from a departure from the doctrine of equal civil and political rights-the claim and exercise of exclusive political control by a few over the many. The South from 1789 to 1860 was the complete type and embodiment of communities in which political power is held exclusively by property and education. By a law as sure and uniform in its results as the operations of Nature, these communities became oligarchies in the most odious sense of the term, hostile in spirit and action to all republican ideas. In seventy years from the foundation of the Government "ordained to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty," the wealth, education, and piety of the South stood ready, sword in hand, to destroy that Government, and to maintain in its place a government proclaimed by its founders to rest on the corner-stone of human slavery. And to-day again, as in 1860, the same oligarchical power, crushing the colored race under its feet, seeks with bloody and rapacious hands to grasp the national power as the agency through which it may extend and perpetuate its own spirit and practice of caste and oppression.

D. H. CHAMBERLAIN.

V.

THE EMPIRE OF THE DISCONTENTED.*

IT has been often remarked that foreigners visiting Russia derive from their journey widely different impressions, according to the social classes they had intercourse with, their personal experience, and still more, perhaps, according to the institutions, habits, and customs of their own country. Indeed, there scarcely can be found another country about which so many different opinions exist as about Russia. It appears to be something of a modern sphinxa puzzle for all mankind, an unraveled and incomprehensible mystery.

That the present state of Russia is most deplorable is a plain fact, which is beyond doubt and discussion. The Russian press itself freely admits it. "Russia has become an empire of the discontented!" exclaimed the celebrated Katkoff, in his "Moscow Gazette," shortly after the war, and this expression has been echoed by the whole public opinion in Russia, and given a theme to all the press. Reviewing the abominable cases of corruption which the last war has disclosed, the "St. Petersburg News" says in a recent issue: "The moral standard of our society seems to have sunk so low that we have utterly lost the faculty of distinguishing right from wrong, honor from baseness, patriotism from egotism. In almost every representative of our official spheres we are led to suspect a rascal and a thief. We distrust each other, we believe no more in ourselves, all honest principles seem to have become an empty phrase; and a cold skepticism in all things not pertaining directly to our personal interests seems to have taken hold of the whole nation." Still more violent in its expressions is the "Novoye Vremja" ("New Time "), the leading St. Petersburg paper. "What a time we are living in!" it exclaims. "Every day brings new dis

*This article is printed unaltered in the author's own English.-EDITOR.

closures, on all sides we are surrounded with rascals who have long ago lost all sense of their moral debasement. In this pestiferous atmosphere honest hearts lose their energy, gradually sink lower and lower, or are crushed in fruitless attempts to shake off the curse lying upon us." Such is the picture of utter demoralization drawn by the Russian press. Muzzled as it is by a barbarous censorship, it can certainly not be suspected of exaggeration. If we add to this picture financial exhaustion and utter impoverishment of the laboring classes caused by an exorbitant and disproportionate taxation, we shall convey to the reader a fair idea of the terrible crisis through which Russia is now passing, and exclude the suspicion of attempting to conceal its importance.

Is this state of affairs hopeless? Is it the agony of the Russian nation? Has the latter played out its part in history, and is this the beginning of an utter decomposition? There is every reason to believe that such is not the case. The nation itself is safe and sound-the czardom alone, that cancer which has for centuries sucked the life's blood out of the Russian people, with its whole train, is rotting off and falling to pieces. What the world is now witnessing is the agony of Russian autocracy. The czardom alone is the true cause of all the misery Russia has endured for centuries and is now still enduring. With its overthrow the nation will breathe freely, and will at last be able to develop all its latent energies. Few foreigners, and especially few citizens of a free country, can form an adequate idea of what the Russian Czar actually is, and of the necessary consequences of the power he is endowed with. I have had occasion to meet several Americans in St. Petersburg who, charmed by the pleasant intercourse with the representatives of the Russian court and high life, were rather inclined to consider the Russian Government a sort of paternal and comfortable arrangement, saving the peaceful citizen a good deal of trouble and expense, and forming a necessary part of the Russian national institutions. The truth, however, is that the czardom is not at all of Russian origin. It was born out of the Tartar yoke, which has weighed on Russia for two centuries. The Asiatic despotism of the Khans crushed all independent classes and political organizations in Russia; and the Czars of Moscow, after driving away the Tartars, continued the same policy, and achieved the work begun by their Moslem predecessors.

The power concentrated in the Russian Czars is without precedent in history, and has at all times exerted a most fatal influence