United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The attempt is often made by southern politicians of the dominant class to justify the Mississippi plan of disfranchisement by pointing to the fact that Massachusetts, a northern state, has provided for a qualified suffrage by the adoption of an educational test. But compared with the Mississippi provision that of Massachusetts is as modest and simple as the average Mississippi school house.
Their rights are not one whit the more sacred because of this fact; but in an argument where injustice is sought to be excused because of fundamental differences of race, it is well enough to bear in mind that the race whose rights and liberties are endangered all over this country by disfranchisement at the South, are the colored people who live in the United States to-day, and not the lowbrowed, man-eating savage whom the Southern white likes to set upon a block and contrast with Shakespeare and Newton and Washington and Lincoln.
Unless the doctrine is vigorously maintained that governments 'derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and not from the conceit of an aristocracy as to its own capacity, then we of the North will not find it easy to protest effectively against the disfranchisement of the Southern Negroes."
He is well known as the author of the first decided movement for liberty of conscience in Massachusetts, his name standing at the head of the famous petition of 1646 for a modification of the laws in respect to religious worship, and complaining in strong terms of the disfranchisement of persons not members of the Church.
If they are not satisfied, you have two millions of subjects in your bosom full of uneasiness: not that they cannot overturn the Act of Settlement, and put themselves and you under an arbitrary master; or that they are not permitted to spawn a hydra of wild republics, on principles of a pretended natural equality in man; but because you will not suffer them to enjoy the ancient, fundamental, tried advantages of a British Constitution, that you will not permit them to profit of the protection of a common father or the freedom of common citizens, and that the only reason which can be assigned for this disfranchisement has a tendency more deeply to ulcerate their minds than the act of exclusion itself.
A few days afterwards Miss Anthony was seated in her brother's office reading the papers when she learned to her amazement that several resolutions had been offered in the House of Representatives sanctioning disfranchisement on account of sex.
"There is no justification for the opinion so strongly expressed, that this measure will fail because the rebel States will not consent to the disfranchisement of any portion of their own people. The proposition is for the loyal States to determine upon what terms they will restore to the Union the insurgent States.
Now, what is the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men, upon their citizenship? The value of food to the human organism is not measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its entire deprivation.
As to disfranchisement on grounds of race, representative Southerners are anxious to demonstrate that the only real disqualification is for ignorance and unfitness; and we must look to them to give practical effect to their professions, which can be done if the existing statutes are applied in a spirit of justice.
Accordingly, one independent member proposed a state grant of £250,000 a year for the endowment of the catholic clergy, who might thus be indirectly bound over to good behaviour, while another proposed the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders. Both of these bills were read a second time, but held over until the fate of the main relief bill should be determined.
Word Of The Day