schools of a higher grade; but the law of compulsion should end with the elementary training, and leave entirely to parental or other private methods instruction in religion and in foreign tongues.

This last point brings us face to face with the latest aspect of the race-question in the United States. Singularly enough, the most formidable phase of the race-question is not the political status of the negroes and the Chinese, as European observers imagine, but the moral and political attitude of a portion of the German immigration. The Irish can be dangerous only through ignorance, which makes them tools of politicians, or through a religious training that makes them tools of priestcraft; and even the small measure of compulsory education that I have insisted on would help to emancipate them from both. They mingle kindly with the native stock; and though still clannish, and fond of a row, they are loyal to the country that has endowed them with manhood, liberty, and comfort.

From the negro and the Chinese society has little to fear, so long as they are let alone, provided always that education up to a certain standard be made a condition of suffrage. The negroes are a docile race, prone to indolence, good-natured, easily contented, and, though addicted to petty vices, not likely to array themselves in open hostility to the laws or to their neighbors. Their behavior or business so as to conflict with this requirement, under a penalty of fifty dollars on the employer.

The trustee of every school-district, or the corresponding official, is to make a semi-annual visitation of all manufacturing establishments where children are employed, to see that the law is obeyed. Penalties are affixed for violation of the law by parents or guardians. School-books are to be provided at the public expense in case of necessity. In case of obstinate refusal of a child to attend school, he is to be regarded as a truant; and the trustees or school-board of each town are to make arrangements for the confinement and discipline of truants as may be necessary. The following cogent arguments secured the passage of this law. The report of the committee demonstrated from an analysis of the last census, first, that, on the average, in this country illiterate persons furnish ten times the number of paupers that they would if given such an education as our free schools offer gratis; secondly, that, in the State of New York, we have one hundred and eighty-nine thousand adults who cannot read and write, of whom seventy-three thousand are males, and hence are or may be voters; thirdly, that this State expends twelve millions of dollars a year upon free schools, thus providing a good elementary education for every one of the million and a half of school-children in the State free of cost; fourthly, that onethird of the children of the school-age are on the average each year kept out of school altogether.

during the war, their patience, and faith in the hope of emancipation, and their self-restraint amid temptations to plunder and massacre, should satisfy their former masters that they have nothing to fear from the negroes, if they will but let them alone in the enjoyment of their liberties and rights; or rather if outside politicians and party tricksters will leave both whites and blacks at the South alone to adjust themselves to their new relations with time and experience. Of themselves, the negroes would hardly organize a race party; and, though led into this error by bad advice and bad example, their native sagacity is teaching them to break the line of color in politics, in order that the best of the blacks may join the best of the whites in saving society from the worst of both races. Time is here the best reconciler.

How far the present apparent conflict of races in the South is due to the mistaken policy upon which the war was conducted, and peace concluded, I have shown in a preceding Lecture. The Rebellion was not a revolt of the Southern people: it was an organic attempt on the part of States to break up the Union by secession. The State organizations were put in motion to destroy the government to which they owed their existence: hence they forfeited all recognition as States. They were not States outside of the Union; neither were they States within the Union as integral members to be conquered back to their allegiance the States as political entities had lapsed by their own suicidal act; and there remained only a territory under the Union, and a population to be made obedient to its laws. Slavery, being the mere creature of State law, perished in the self-annihilation of the State. It was then open to the government of the United States to erect the pacified Southern Territories into States as one by one they should renounce the dogma of secession, establish a republican form of government, make all men equal before the law, and open suffrage to all upon the same conditions. By the salutary working of human nature seeking its own interests, some States would have been constituted and

1 See my address of June 20, 1861, in the Independent of July 11; also my discourse on Abraham Lincoln, April 30, 1865 (Loyal Publication Society).

admitted to the Union sooner than others, thus forestalling the danger of "a solid South." And just as political parties in the North have bidden for the Irish vote, the German vote, the working-man's vote, so parties in the South would have courted the negro vote, thus merging the "conflict of races" in their own conflict of political interests. But the erroneous theory of dealing with seceded States having been adopted at the outbreak of the Rebellion, common sense and human nature were lost sight of in the rigmarole of "reconstruction." For one, I am not in the least disappointed in the consequences of making the negro a specialty of politics and philanthropy, instead of treating him simply as a man, to be aided and protected just as other men, neither more nor less. Having fought for twenty years for the emancipation of the slave, when to care for the negro was to risk what most men prize in life, - the moment the slave was made a freeman before the law, I felt bound in his interest as a man, no less than in the interest of society and the State, to protest against coddling the freedman as "the ward of the nation." Directly after the war, a worthy black man applied to me for aid in starting a special theological school for black men in Ohio. I declined. With much surprise he said, "I was sent to you, sir, as a strong friend of my race." 66 Exactly so; and it is as a friend of your race that I decline to aid a project, which, now that you are free, would stamp you as a separate caste. In times of obloquy I did what I could to aid Oberlin College, because there the black man was treated as the equal of the white in all opportunities for study and improvement; and now you ask me to turn my back on Oberlin, which has fought your battle, and help you start a rival caste college near by in Ohio. I shall do no such thing. In any community where as yet you have no opportunity for equal education, I will help your schools and churches on the ground that they are needed and are poor, but not on the plea that they are black. If your race would rise, you must at once begin to act as men, and not expect to be either pitied or petted as negroes." My applicant was sorely puzzled at the discovery, that though it were worth the blood and treasure of the nation to redeem the slave

because he was a man, yet, on becoming a freeman, he was only a man, and must not look for exceptional favors "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Some time after, I was much gratified at seeing this wholesome and needed truth put forth with his accustomed manliness and vigor by that noble and eloquent champion of freedom and equality, Mr. Frederick Douglass. Fourth-of-July address at Hillsdale, Mr. Douglass said to and for his race,

In a

"All we ask is a fair field to work in, and the white man to leave us alone. We have been injured more than we have been helped by men who have professed to be our friends. Fellow-citizens, we must stop these men from begging for us. They misrepresent us, and cause the country to look upon us as a poor and helpless people. They say, 'Please give something to help to educate the poor black people; but do, I pray, pay it to me:' and, if it is a hundred dollars, it is reduced to about a hundred cents when it gets to the 'poor black people.' We do not want, we will not have, these second-rate men begging for us. We protest against it."

Smarting under the experience of the Freedman's Savings Bank, as one of the guardians of the wards of the nation," Mr. Douglass said, "We propose to cut loose from all invidious class institutions, and to part company with all those wandering mendicants who have followed us simply for paltry gain. We now bid an affectionate farewell to all these plunderers; and in the future, if we need a Moses, we will find him in our own tribes."

These are brave words, and sensible as plucky. The whole negro problem in the South would be solved by the formula, "A fair field to work in, and the white man to leave us alone." We cannot recover in a day the ground lost by the mistaken theory of the war and of reconstruction; but the case is by no means hopeless, nor so formidable as some imagine. In a paper on "The Question of Races in the United States," read before the Association for the Promotion of Social Science at its session in Glasgow, October, 1874, I ventured to say, "If the political element of the problem could be withdrawn, the so-called conflict of races would be greatly modified, if, indeed, it would not wholly cease. The present commotion in the South, though marked by the formation of the 'white man's league,' is to be ascribed more to political

misrule than to prejudice of race." Since then, the experiences of the presidential election have fully confirmed this opinion. No former slaveholder had any objection to the negro's voting on the ground that he was a negro. The negro who presented himself at the polls for the avowed purpose of voting the Democratic ticket encountered no prejudice of race, and needed no United-States troops to protect him in the exercise of his suffrage. Had the Southern States been re-organized upon the basis of. impartial suffrage,—that is, suffrage upon local conditions fairly within the reach of all, instead of indiscriminate universal suffrage enforced from without, the native whites of the South would have been divided into rival parties, each bidding for the negro vote, and each caring that the negro should have a vote. But the just-emancipated slaves, in all their ignorance and incompetence, were thrown upon the South en masse as voters and rulers. To the whites of the South, defeated in war, impoverished, and in some cases disfranchised, these black voters and rulers represented the power that had conquered them, and the party that sought again to conquer them in the field of politics. Here was a chronic cause of distrust and disturbance; and can any wonder at what has followed? Careful and candid observers, such as Mr. Charles Nordhoff and Mr. Watson (of "The London Times"), testify, that, wherever society is left to its normal conditions, industry and comfort are advancing in the South; and that whites and blacks live amicably together, unless disturbed by attempts from without to direct the political action of the negroes as a class. Through all the excitements of the late presidential election, the South attested its loyalty to the Union, and its aversion to another civil war. There can be little doubt, that, if the South is left to itself, the "conflict of races will gradually die out; that justice and confidence will gain with time. If, unhappily, there should arise a conflict of arms between the whites and blacks in any State, is there any resource under our political system but either to localize the conflict, and leave the parties to fight it out, or, on the ground of anarchy, to declare the State dissolved, and govern it as a Territory by the military