declared to be men.

The Southern press, which both creates and voices public opinion,
reveals an attitude of mind increasingly hostile to the equal civil
rights of the black man, for the simple reason that he is not white,
which is calculated to fill the friends of American institutions with
gravest apprehensions, and which demands the serious attention of us
all. Almost every week discloses to us the fact that intimidation,
oppression and violence do override the government of the land, in its
application to the Negro people. Influential Southern journals have
pronounced the Fifteenth Amendment a living threat to the civilization
of the South, and declare that Christian statesmanship demands its
abrogation.

A thoughtful book published in New York, written in a calm and judicial
tone by an able lawyer in Virginia, in its chapter upon the future of
the Negro, says: "The social aspect of the Negro suffrage is certain to
_grow more_ threatening as the blacks increase. The motives which have
led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment
in force in the age to follow. To day the rapid increase of the black
population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our
government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European
monarchies. The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future
would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the
South, then to the prosperity of the Union." This is a temperate
expression of much Southern opinion.

Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro
tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the
Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar