VOTING.
The Boston Transcript has this letter from Dr. Horace Bumstead:
“Dr. Doremus Scudder of Hawaii told the American Missionary Association in Tremont Temple that the American Negro of the future will thank his Southern white brother for depriving him of the ballot until he should have proved his fitness for it—and that he would thank him notwithstanding the manner in which his ballot had been taken away. Let us see just what this means.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a disfranchisement practically based on color rather than unfitness—which its promoters have boldly avowed was intended to disfranchise every Negro if possible and not one white man if it could be avoided, and which they accomplished through ‘grandfather’ and ‘understanding’ clauses artfully devised to deprive the Negro of his constitutional guarantees for a square deal as regards suffrage qualifications.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a disfranchisement which is seriously restricting his economic freedom and opportunity, the protection of his life and property, his right to travel in equal comfort for an equal fare, the education of his children, and the guarding of the virtue of his wife and daughters.
“This conclusion Dr. Scudder naively states he has arrived at after seven years’ residence, not in the South, but in Hawaii, and because the liquor dealers there have bought up the votes of the natives. In other words, when white men have so little control over their baser element that they cannot keep them from offering bribes, the proper course, in Dr. Scudder’s opinion, seems to be to take the ballot from all colored men because some of them have accepted bribes, rather than to disfranchise the few white men who have offered them.
“When American Negroes become grateful for a disfranchisement accomplished in such ways, and on such grounds, and with such detriment to their own welfare, they will have proved themselves unworthy of American citizenship. And that time will never come. They are willing to play the political game with their white brothers on equal terms, but not with loaded dice and marked cards.”