The same thing probably
is true in St. Louis, and likely to be true before long throughout
Missouri. There are thirty States out of forty-five, and
there will before long probably be thirty-five out of fifty
in which the old race feeling, growing out of slavery has
never got a hold. The old race-hatred of the negro is getting
into a corner. So far reconstruction has not been a failure.
Two things are not yet accomplished. There are eleven States
in which the negro is not yet secure in his political rights;
and there are as many, and perhaps two or three more, in which
if he be suspected of a crime of the first magnitude, he is
likely to undergo a cruel death, without a trial. That would
have been quite as likely, indeed a good deal more likely
to have happened, if the reconstruction measures had never
been enacted.
It is a bad thing that any man who has the Constitutional
right to vote should fail to have his vote received and counted.
But I think it is a fair question whether the existence of
this condition throughout so large a country, with the prospect
that slowly and gradually as the negro improves he will get
his rights, be not better than the alternative which must
have been his reduction to slavery again, or what is nearly
as bad, a race of peons in this country.
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