national canvass. What we are considering is something practical, something that means attainable progress. It seems to me to follow, therefore, that there is, or ought to be, a common ground upon which we can all stand in respect to the race question in the South, and its political bearing, that takes away any justification for maintaining the continued solidity of the South to prevent the so-called Negro domination. The fear that in some way or other a social equality between the races shall be enforced by law or brought about by political measures really has no foundation except in the imagination of those who fear such a result. The Federal Government has nothing to do with social equality. The war amendments do not declare in favor of social equality. All that the law or Constitution attempt to secure is equality of opportunity before the law and in the pursuit of happiness, and in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. Social equality is something[Pg 12] that grows out of voluntary concessions by the individuals forming society.

[Pg 12]

With the elimination of the race question, can we say that there are removed all the reasons why the people of the South are reluctant to give up their political solidarity and divide themselves on party lines in accordance with their economic and political views? No. There are other reasons, perhaps only reasons of sentiment, but with the Southern people, who are a high-strung, sensitive, and outspoken people, considerations of sentiment are frequently quite as strong as those of some political or economic character. In the first place it is now nearly forty years since the South acquired its political solidarity, and the intensity of feeling by which it was maintained, and the ostracism and social proscription imposed on those white Southerners who did not sympathize with the necessity for such solidarity, could not but make lasting impression and create a permanent bias that would naturally outlast the reason for its original existence. The trials of the reconstruction period, the heat of the political controversies with the Republican party, all naturally, during the forty years, implanted so deep a feeling in the Southern Democratic breast that a mere change of the conditions under which this feeling was engendered could not at once remove it. The Southern people are a homogeneous people; they preserve their traditions; they are of the purest American stock; and the faith of the father is handed down to the son, even after the cause of it has ceased, almost as a sacred legacy.

Again, for a long time succeeding the war, the South continued poor. Its 

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