of age of a little more than five millions, of whom fifty-one per cent., or 2,555,751, cannot read and write! Their inhabitants over twenty-one years of age are 3,090,000; of these, fifty-one and onequarter per cent., or 1,572,101, cannot read and write!

This state of things is the result of social disease of long standing, and calls for the aid of the physician, whose prescriptions must be wise laws and careful administration.

The assessed valuation for taxation of property, both real and personal, in these nine States in 1860, was $3,244,239,406. This was reduced in 1870 to the sum of $1,830,863,180. In other words, in the ten years including the Rebellion their taxable property had shrunk forty-three and one-quarter per cent. This shrinkage was the result partly of social disease, slavery; and partly of injury inflicted during the Rebellion, both by themselves and by us.

Their ability to raise money by taxation was thus in ten years reduced nearly one-half, while the immediate necessity that is upon them, in order to fit themselves for free government based upon universal suffrage, of changing nearly three millions of human cattle, late slaves, that formerly required nothing but food and the lash, into three millions of human beings, wielding the ballot and demanding education and protection, has tempor. arily nearly doubled the public burdens to be borne by taxation. Here is just where the surgeon's skill in the shape of pecuniary splints, plasters, and bandages, that is, financial help, is required.

This additional annual burden, to make intelligent human beings out of these late human cattle, must be borne, and be borne now. It cannot be thrown off and left for the next generation, without causing a social and political disease worse and more fatal to the nation than hospital gangrene to the wounded soldier, or scrofula to the individual. The dense ignorance of these three millions of full-fledged citizens either will be the death of free government, or it will generate a distorted and diseased form of it, worse for the nation than intelligent despotism.

We, as a nation, have just experienced a striking example of the danger of deferring or neglecting a great public moral duty. A hundred years ago we were afflicted with a national malady, human slavery, that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, and all history, taught us must be uprooted, or it would strangle the Republic. We put off its extirpation for a century, and it cost us ten billions of money and a half million lives to repair our neglect.

Before prescribing a remedy for the misfortunes that exist in the Southern States, we must ask ourselves, "What is to-day the condition of society there; for what is feasible in one state of society may be wholly impracticable in another; what a homogeneous people may receive gladly, a heterogeneous one may reject utterly."

Their whole population is 6,887,475, of whom fifty-six and onehalf per cent., or 3,896,320, are white, and were born under a system of caste that had of necessity to make might right, and to hold a white skin to be a sort of patent of nobility, a proof of he reditary right to rule. This fifty-six and one half per cent. cannot, so long as they live, help feeling that they still have, or ought to have, this right. We cannot expect them to feel otherwise; for, like ourselves, they are subject to the laws of habit and early training. We should feel and think as they do, had we been brought up and educated as they have.

Forty-three and one-half per cent. of the population, or 2,991,155, are colored, and came out of bondage; born to obey, not to think; to serve, not to rule.

All, both white and colored, grew up in a state of society that held manual labor degrading-the occupation of slaves; hence, the poor white, unable to own slaves himself, became a loafer and a hanger-on upon those who did own them; and the freedman's first idea of liberty was chronic idleness. The stimulus to industry and economy, that intelligence gives, was wanting.

Their politics and governments were in name democratic-republican, but in fact tyrannical and despotic oligarchies; and, however free in theory, were in practice intolerant and truculent. Ours would have been the same if we had been similarly situated. They were not to blame for this; it was a necessity of the social state of masters and slaves, from which they have now just emerged. The system of slavery, and the training of the whole body of inhabitants under it, both masters and slaves, was in perpetual and irreconcilable antagonism with any government based on equal civil rights of all inhabitants. That training remains, and must remain, till this generation passes away.

The five years' struggle of the Rebellion did not ameliorate the evils of this state of society; it rather intensified and embittered them. And it is not at all strange that, when peace was restored, the Southern whites, instead of giving their hands to the colored man, and asking him to buy some of their untilled acres, felt

more like giving him a kick, as, somehow, the cause of their misfortunes. In many localities they resolved that, come what may, they would not sell him an acre of their soil. Every attempt from the North to educate the freedmen was naturally looked upon, at first by the Southern whites, not as a philanthropic effort. to transform those idle human cattle into intelligent, industrious, and productive human beings, but as a scheme of outsiders to transfer political power and office from the white race to the colored.

The Southern whites, from prejudice and wrong education, and the Southern blacks, from ignorance and inexperience, were unfit at the close of the civil war to rule a State where each human being has equal civil rights.

A difficult problem, then, was twelve years ago presented to the national Government. If it followed historical precedents, it would establish military rule in the Southern States until the inhabitants were qualified to govern themselves according to the declaration of human rights contained in the Preamble to the National Constitution. But this was contrary to the theory of our Government, that each State or territory should rule itself, and was distasteful to the great body of the nation. If it yielded to the wishes of intelligent Southerners, it would give them the sole power of reconstruction. But this would simply have reha bilitated the white oligarchy. If it followed the dictates of humanity and mere legal rights, it would have intrusted the restoration of the South only to the loyal inhabitants. But this would have confined it at first chiefly to the colored race, who, however well disposed, were utterly incompetent for the task, and would have wrecked the whole proceeding.

Every plan presented to President Lincoln had its difficulties; these were so manifest that he was unwilling to adopt any one method to the exclusion of all others. The only step that seemed clear, as a necessity in a free State, was to give the colored man the right of suffrage in order that he might protect himself with ballots instead of bullets. This was an act of beneficence to all, both white and colored. It was a guaranty of a final peaceful solution of the difficulty.

The objection to it was, it put into four millions of hands, wholly ignorant of its use, the most powerful and the most destructive weapon known to free governments, the ballot; and a weapon, too, which, once given, could never, without a revolution, be taken away.

Besides, in the late Slave States there were 317,281 adult whites who could not read the ballots they cast; and yet they (that is the male portion of them) possessed the right of suffrage. This unlettered white multitude were a large percentage of the voting white population; and the portion most dangerous to the freed-, men; most given to mobs and murders.

In the Northern States, too, there were 411,399 adult illiterate whites, mostly foreign-born, it is true, but yet full-fledged voters. On the suppression of the Rebellion the color line disappeared from our Statute Books; and, on principle, the unlettered black had as good right to the ballot as the unlettered white, and would make no worse use of it. In fact, he is by nature much less given to violence than the white is, and more easily controlled. The right of suffrage was, therefore, conferred upon him.

Now, what temporarily followed in the cotton States? Just precisely what every student of history knew would follow the putting political power into unskilled hands, whether white or colored. The finances of these States were swamped; their industries, for the time being, deranged; public improvements stopped; public education neglected on the plea of poverty; and their elections a farce or a tragedy.

The three thousand unpunished political murders stated by a Southern member of Congress to have been committed there since civil government was restored to them, and the political slaughters at New Orleans, Coushatta, and Colfax, and the Chisholm massacre in Kemper Co., Miss., show that the tragedy is quite as frequent as the farce, though the actors in the former are whites, while in the latter they are more likely to be colored.

Some people think these States have done badly; a more just opinion is, they have done better, on the whole, than we had a right to expect. A complete social, industrial, and political transformation cannot be wrought in a people in a day; it takes an age, at least.

The result would have been similar, though more bloody, had the fifty-one and one quarter per cent. of illiterate voters been all white, instead of largely colored.

In 1793 France established the Republic and universal suffrage. But the majority of the voters, as in the Southern States, were illiterate; and the Republic, after shedding rivers of blood, became in seven years a military despotism. She repeated the experiment in 1848; but more than half the citizens then, though white, could not read the ballots they put into the electoral urns; and after

four years of experiment they chose, in 1852, a military despot by an enormous majority.

Spain has just gone through a similar farcical and tragical experience. Her unlettered white rabble in a few months gladly exchanged the republic of Castellar for the despotism of a Bourbon.

The Spanish Colonies in America fifty years ago founded half a score of republics, all based upon ignorant suffrage; they have enjoyed neither domestic peace nor prosperity since. Their normal condition is revolution; and will continue to be revolution, until either the ballot is restricted to the intelligent, or strong military governments, fitted for ignorant peoples, supplant the republics.

France, Spain, the Spanish American Republics-in fact, all countries where a large percentage of the adults are ignorantmust, in order to be peaceful and prosperous, have a strong gov.

ernment.

There must be a power guided by intelligence, outside of and above the ignorant mass, as long as this mass remains ignorant, capable of ruling and directing it.

Free Government and Ignorant Suffrage.

Free government and ignorant suffrage cannot long endure together. One or the other must go under. Like a ship at sea without master or navigator, free government in such connection founders in the first storm.

The late Emperor Napoleon, while President of France, published a book called "Napoleonic Ideas." The gist of it is, that democracy, with universal suffrage, necessarily and logically, to secure public order and prosperity, culminates in choosing an emperor or despot for life. From the standpoint of ignorant suffrage, like France in 1802 and in 1852, he was right. The Southern States are to-day in a state of mind leading to a similar act of political suicide if they find no other way of escaping the dangers and disasters of ignorant suffrage; hence the intimidation and practical disfranchisement of the freedmen.

Intelligent and conservative England extends the ballot, but extends education with it. A distinguished liberal, the Hon. W. E. Forster, said, in Parliament, to the radical wing of his party, "You demand universal suffrage; I demand universal education to go with it."

In republican Sparta, Lycurgus, two thousand seven hundred. and fifty years ago, compelled the education of every citizen. In democratic Athens, Solon, two thousand four hundred and fifty