I may also state that the large colored population of Nashville freely exercises the right of suffrage. They have wise and discreet advisers and friends, and public sentiment usually deals justly with this question. Illegalities sometimes occur, but they are evils incident to the mixed condition of society, and to the presence of this large class of uneducated citizens; evils that would occur with similar elements of population in Toledo, Cleveland, or Columbus. As a rule, a just public sentiment also concedes to the colored citizens the full measure of their personal and civil rights in the immediate section under my observation.

In the race of life they are given a fair, square chance— a chance to accumulate property, to educate their children, to vote their sentiments, and to demonstrate to the world their title to respect and recognition as a people. Whatever of good capacity has been implanted by Providence in the African race, our Northern friends may be assured, is finding opportunity for development. Its future is already practically in its own hands.

Within the limits of the cotton belt proper their progress is not so satisfactory. Some of the problems involving their future are still in the experimental stage, but their condition is improving. The same educational and elevating influences are usually at work. Whites and blacks know well that the prosperity and security of both races depend upon kindly and peaceful relations. These relations usually exist. The majority of the whites are intelligent and fair-minded. The colored race is patient, faithful, and generally industrious.

Both elements are entitled to sympathy and forbearance. In the main they will have to work their own way out of the political difficulties that encompass them, supplemented, perhaps, by such wise national legislation as shall show the

patience of the North, and will have respect for the sincerity and good faith of the efforts of the Christian people of the South.

In his present condition, local, municipal, or political power may be of little real benefit to the colored man. It is not now absolutely necessary for his personal safety, his education, or development in citizenship, yet it may be vital to good order and to the property interests of his neighbor, the more intelligent white man.

Power without intelligence, or misdirected, is a constant danger. The average colored voter of the cotton belt is as yet a field hand. As a As a politician, he is as a child. Injustice is therefore inherent in any settlement of the suffrage problem in the far South, under our present franchise laws. While a very sacred principle is involved in this problem, the evil consequences are fortunately local and limited, and we hope in a measure temporary.

The good influences that will be developed in a decade or two of peace and kindly relations seem to promise the safest and most certain assurances of an ultimate cure. Enactments forced upon unwilling communities are generally inoperative, and the exercise of sufficient power to compel obedience in the face of sincere convictions, sometimes becomes a greater injustice than the original wrong.

The North can well afford to be forbearing and fraternal. The gift of suffrage to a race enslaved for two centuries and as yet unfitted for this high prerogative of citizenship, came from the North.

The ancient rule of the so-called slave power, so long dominant or potent in national affairs, has become only a tradition. Irresistible events have minimized its forces. By the new census the population of the cotton belt has not kept pace with that of the central South. The great North

west is still outstripping both. The senators of six new states of the North have but lately taken their places in the national council beside the senators of the six gulf states. What a flood of reflections they recall! Twelve senators from the new North-west with powers and privileges in the national council equal to the senators of the gulf states-` states that comprised half the numbers and force of the Southern Confederacy. Industrial and commercial agencies are also pushing their way southward and contributing to the great work of unification.

Therefore, I say the North can afford not only to do right, but to be generous. Power and magnanimity should go hand in hand. The two sections should fraternize. They can not always live politically apart and estranged and upon traditions. Nearly a generation has come and gone since the single issue that so long divided them was practically settled.

When considered in the light of subsequent events, the political position of the South in 1860-61, seems now almost incomprehensible to the Northern mind and to the new gen

eration.

Only a retrospect from a Southern standpoint can enable us to understand, or partially understand, the state of public sentiment then existing. That the vast body of intelligent Southern people could have learned to hold the union of the states in such light esteem, for the causes sincerely and gravely alleged by them, in the light of the thought of the present time, can not but be regarded, even by them, as a most unreasonable and a merely passionate view of the difficulties that then environed them.

Under the stimulus of opposition at the North and selfinterest at home, the influence of the institution of slavery had gradually become so deeply interwoven into the life and

heart of the Southern people that it absorbed and controlled all other interests. It wrapped itself about the conscience of the South and became a part of its very religion.

That it existed by divine authority, that it was a sacred and Christian duty to maintain and extend it, that the opposition to it at the North was not only unconstitutional, but was actually atheistic and unholy, was declared by the highest authorities in church and state. The story of the career of slavery in the South, in fact, reads like a chapter in mediæval or Spanish American history.

As is well known, this was not the view taken of this institution by the fathers of the constitution from the South, by WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, MADISON, HENRY. The great conservative leaders and friends of the South at a later period were not in harmony with it. Men of the HENRY CLAY school, thoughtful men like ROBERT E. LEE, had no sympathy with these extreme views.

As early as 1837, in the Senate of the United States, the great apostle of this more modern school and new dogma regarding slavery, MR. CALHOUN, the eminent Southern statesman, announced the new doctrine. "Many in the South," he states, "once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." What a paradox!

In the course of his address before the Senate, Mr. CALHOUN stated that "a mysterious Providence had brought together two races from different parts of the globe, and placed them together in nearly equal numbers in the Southern portion of the Union." Whereupon, HENRY CLAY arose and replied, that to call a generation of slave-trading pirates who had brought the slaves to this country a mysterious

Providence, was an insult to the Supreme Being. This incident will illustrate the views of the two Southern statesmen and of the men of these two classes. MR. CALHOUN and the later school of Southern partisans, supported by the logic of selfish interests, finally wrought a fundamental change in public opinion at the South on this question. How strange the retrospect! How strange that a great body of intelligent Christian people could be led by such counsels, not only to regard slavery as the "most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world," but to be willing to wreck the very life of the nation, rather than surrender or endanger even the privilege of extending its so-called blessings into the new territories of the West and North-west.

Had the Southern Confederacy finally succeeded in achieving its independence, with slavery as its "chief corner stone," as declared by its eloquent Vice-President, ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS, perhaps we might have lived to see a Southern Goddess of Liberty in stately bronze towering above the harbor of Charleston, bearing aloft an electric torch, and proclaiming to the nations, not "liberty enlightening the world," but "slavery the foundation of liberty!" Think of it!

CALHOUN was a remarkable man. The new generation of to-day will find it difficult to justly measure him. His dignified presence, his exalted personal character, his splendid intellect, his power in debate, his consistent inconsistency, were not generally characteristics of the mere partisan. His political errors, ennobled in the eyes of the South by his personal virtues, became a fatal illusion.

The fathers of the constitution of 1787 were a wise and patriotic group of statesmen. In a public address MR. GLADSTONE declared that they were "a match for any body of men in the history of the world, and were superior to