simple truth is that public opinion on those two subjects had outgrown the Constitution.

No man contributed more to the development of public opinion against disunion than did Mr. Webster. When he made his great speech in 1830 in reply to Mr. Hayne, closing with that matchless tribute to the Union flag: "The broad ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the world, still full high advanced"-he created and vitalized and electrified Union sentiment throughout the length and breadth of the land. That speech, more than the word or deed of any other one man, prepared the way for the coming of Lincoln, and made possible the vast armies of Grant. After all, should not Webster be given first place in the Hall of Fame dedicated to Saviors of the Union?

THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT.

The fifteenth amendment, ratified in 1872, prohibited the United States or any State, in prescribing suffrage qualifications, from discriminating against citizens of the United States on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. It did not confer the ballot upon any one-it only prohibited discrimination on account of a specified difference. The right to vote is not a privilege or attribute of national citizenship under either the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment; but the right to be exempt from discrimination in voting on account of race is an at

tribute of national citizenship under the fifteenth amendment.

This amendment was at the time of its adoption a doubtful and dangerous experiment-but once made, it is beyond recall.

It embodied a distinct addition to the principle set out in the second section of the fourteenth amendment, which latter impliedly permitted a State to deny the ballot to the negro if it were willing to suffer the penalty of a proportionate reduction of representation in the lower house of Congress.

So far as the negro is concerned, the second section of the fourteenth amendment was a political compromise against him, while the fifteenth amendment was a complete declaration of his equal suffrage rights.

A resolution for a fourteenth amendment, in almost the identical words finally used in this second section in 1868, had been up for discussion in the Senate as early as 1866. Charles Sumner then denounced it as "a compromise of human rights, the most immoral, indecent and utterly shameful of any in our history."

Mr. Blaine, in his book, "Twenty Years in Congress," took the position that the enactment of the fifteenth amendment operated as a practical repeal of the second section of the fourteenth amendment. He says: "Before the adoption of the fifteenth amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage the next step would be for Con

gress to exclude the negro from the basis of apportionment. After the adoption of the fifteenth amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for the Supreme Court to declare the act was unconstitutional and therefore null and void.”

Some latter-day statesmen, who have introduced bills in Congress to reduce Southern representation, do not seem to agree with Mr. Blaine.

Verily, if the party of Sumner should ever abandon the vindication of the fifteenth amendment by substituting for it the compromise of the fourteenth amendment, the shade of that eminent statesman would surely be moved to indignation and contemptif it still concerns itself with mundane political affairs. Such a substitute-compromise now could bring no good to either whites or blacks of the South. It would work evil and evil only.

SOME REASONS FOR ADOPTING THE FIFTEENTH
AMENDMENT.

The fifteenth amendment was naturally received. with much bitterness by the white people of the South, because many of them interpreted it to mean that our political enemies of the North, who held control of the government, intended thereby to doom the South to perpetual negro domination.

No doubt many of such advocates were moved by prejudice and hate, but we of the South, in this day, must not blind ourselves to the fact that this

amendment was advocated by some men then in public life who were not controlled by such base motives, but were patriotically striving to settle a great fundamental question of government on an enduring basis.

Let us not forget that when Congress passed the joint resolution submitting the fifteenth amendment to the States for adoption, the negroes had already been made citizens of the United States by the fourteenth amendment, and it was impossible to conjoin that status of citizenship with a total exclusion of the negro race from the ballot without undermining some of the foundation principles of our representative Republic.

Bear in mind, also, that at the time when Congress acted on that resolution in 1869, the negro had already exercised the right of suffrage under the reconstruction acts of Congress, beginning in 1867. It was not under the fifteenth amendment, but under the prior reconstruction acts, that the negroes cast their first ballots.

So that the issue then was, not whether to give the negroes something they had never possessed, but whether to deny them in the future a privilege they had already actually enjoyed.

The Southern States were expecting soon to be restored to political autonomy. What stand would the white people of those States take as to the rights of their former slaves? To what extremes of pillage and slaughter might not the millions of negroes go

To what

under fear of partial or total re-enslavement? These and other questions were hard to answer. ever point of the political horizon the thoughtful patriot turned his gaze, the clouds were dark and portentous. A crisis was at hand. It had to be met.

Giving the ballot to five million of newly-freed slaves, of an inferior or backward race, ignorant, unaccustomed to do or think for themselves, could not have been the deliberate act of wise statesmanship, but only the choice of what seemed to be the lesser of two evils. In truth, the whole plan seems to have been an effort not only to obliterate at once, as with a stroke of the pen, all distinctions imposed by law, but to ignore all distinctions imposed by nature.

Many thoughtful men at the North are now of the opinion that it would have been far better had the military control in the South been continued and the ballot withheld for a time, at least, from the freed men, and finally bestowed upon them by degrees. But that is a dead issue now.

As a practical measure of procedure, the fifteenth amendment was in many respects harsh and cruel toward the white people of the South, but theoretically it was necessary to round out the Constitution of a representative Republic, based on that equality of citizenship before the law which had already been foreshadowed by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments.

We may well thank God that the South has recovered from the immediate shock of these rough