It is customary for political speakers to say that the campaign in which they are engaged is the most important in the State's history. We can truthfully say that about this campaign, for the issue affects our fundamental law. It is proposed to change our Constitution and modify the provisions regulating the suffrage of the people. Prior to 1894 the State had been continuously Democratic for a quarter of a century, and the people were reasonably satisfied. In 1894 many of the best men in North Carolina, dissatisfied on account of the administration of the national affairs of our party, saw proper to sever their allegiance from the party of their fathers, the party of their young manhood, the party whose principles they loved, and whose history they had helped to write. They shook hands with their ancient political enemies of the Republican Party. It was not long before they found that they had made a mistake. They came to see that when they shook hands with the enemies of the Democratic Party they had joined hands with the enemies of North Carolina. The alliance which they formed was about to consummate the ruin of the State, and brought shame to all the people. Scarcely a law among the Statutes of 1895 and 1897 except those which good men would prefer had never been written. When the Legislature of 1899 met, Dan Hugh McLane, of the County of Harnett, introduced a Bill to repeal all Acts of the Legislature of 1895 and 1897, but the Legislature thought those laws should be treated as well as Sodom was treated. You remember that God promised to spare Sodom if there were five righteous men in the city, and we thought that peradventure there might be five righteous laws in the whole lot, and so we spared them as a whole. If the good men who quit the Democratic Party in 1894 had had the remotest idea that the new alliance which they formed would have resulted as it did, they would have been as far from quitting the Democratic Party as we are today. And so in 1898 they came back home, many of them—they came back to the house of their fathers and the house of their young manhood—they quit the house of political prostitutes, and we welcomed them back. We killed the fatted calf for them, but did not treat them as prodigals. They were somewhat like the young country boy who got married and went off on a bridal trip. He had some money, and stopped at the finest hotel in the city. The next morning they had nice brown fish cakes for breakfast. He never had seen any such things before, and thought they were biscuits. He reached out his hand and took one and tried to cut it open. As it would not cut, he pulled it open with his fingers, and did not like the looks of the inside much. He pinched a piece out of it, smelled of it, turned around to his bride and said, "Sal, this seems to be a mighty nice hotel, and these people have treated us mighty nice, and I don't like to say anything agin them, but I'll be durned if there isn't something rotten in this bread." Sal she smelled of it and turned up her nose, and said she'd be dinged if the whole thing wasn't rotten, and she was gwine to leave any such house. And these good men left the house where dwelt that mongrel crew, and helped us to win the great victory of 1898. They feel better, too. A man by the name of Barefoot, in the County of Harnett, told me the other day that he left in 1894, but that his old father who raised him a Democrat told him that he and all his brothers would come back, because he left from honest motives. He said that good old father was dead and gone, but that his prophecy had been fulfilled; that he was back, that he felt better because he was among white folks, and that his brothers were coming back. You, my friends, who have left, are not happy where you are. You never will be satisfied again until you get within the Democratic Party where you belong. When that Legislature of 1898 met, it found many things to undo and many things to do. The political pie hunters that were in power from 1894 to 1898 had laid their unholy hands on every institution in the State save one. They had practically destroyed the public school system. In the good old Republican County of Madison three school houses were burned to ashes by an indignant people because they would not suffer their school money stolen and squandered. The Democratic Legislature of 1898 had to re-write the laws relating to railroads and all other corporations in the State, and had to re-organize the public institutions of the State, and had to rehabilitate the public school system.

It was necessary to pass a separate car law, which was a great blessing to the people of Eastern North Carolina, especially to those who ride in second-class coaches. They had to relieve white people of many of the counties of the East from the shame and humiliation of negro domination.

But there is one act which we passed which is of more importance than all other acts put together. It is an act that is today engrossing the attention of the people of North Carolina throughout the whole State. People think about it and talk about it wherever two or three are gathered together. That act, if it become a law, will simply make the written law of North Carolina conform to the unwritten law. It will write into law what has already been determined in the breast of every white man in North Carolina. It will make the Constitution of our State conform to the moral law, if you please, yes, to the Divine Law that was indicated when God made the races of men. It will write into an irrevocable constitutional decree, that the white men of North Carolina shall make and administer all the laws. This is the purpose and effect of the Constitutional Amendment. That Amendment is not yet written into law. You have heard of the doctrine of the initiative and the referendum. They say it is a Populist doctrine. That is a mistake. It was conceived 4,000 years before the Populist Party was ever heard of, and will exist 4,000 years after the Populist Party is dead and forgotten. Four thousand years ago the people of Israel assembled on Mt. Ebal and Gerizim. There they were assembled in that awful Presence, with the majestic mountains towering around—men, women and children, prophets, priests and rabbis—and that law which was handed down to them by their law givers, which has been a law unto the people of Israel and their fathers for 4,000 years, and which has been a law unto us and unto our fathers, and will be a law unto all generations of men, had no effect and force of law until the Levites stood up before the people and read it line by line and item by item, and until it was ratified and acknowledged as a law by all the people of Israel. That was the first and grandest constitutional convention that history records. And so on the second day of next August another great constitutional convention will assemble. It will assemble around the ballot box in North Carolina, from the shadows of the Great Smoky Mountains, on the purple hills of the Piedmont, and in this Tidewater section. In that convention the men of North Carolina will speak, and of that convention, you, my friend, will be a member, and however poor and however humble you be, your voice will be heard and heeded as much as the voice of the greatest and most enlightened in all this land. The people of North Carolina will speak, and when they do speak in their sovereign capacity as a people, and write this Amendment into their fundamental law, it will be a law unto us and unto our children. And George White and Marion Butler and Abe Middleton, and the gates of Hell thrown in, shall not prevail against it. This Amendment has been much misrepresented by the revenue doodlers of this State. We expected this. We expected them to deceive the people in every possible way. I will read you the fourth and fifth sections of the Amendment, as they are the only sections that the Republicans complain of. You have doubtless heard that before a man could vote under this amendment he must own three hundred dollars worth of property. An illiterate man in Morganton told me the other day that he had been told by one of these fellows that before a man could vote he must be able to read and write in three separate languages. They would deceive the very elect if they could. Do not take their reading of the Amendment. They will read it to suit themselves. If you cannot read it get some good Democratic neighbor to read it for you, or some honest Republican—if you can find him, or honest Populist, as to that matter. These revenue officers would, if they could, do like the boys did the old minister, who announced on one Sunday what chapter of the Scripture he would read from. He was going to read from that chapter that tells of Noah and the Deluge, and describes the Ark. These two boys got into the church, found his place, and pasted two of the leaves of the Bible together, so that they looked like one leaf. The old minister got up, opened his Bible at the place he had picked out, and read: "In those days Noah took unto himself a wife, who was at that time," and he turned over the leaf, "three hundred cubits long, forty cubits deep and twenty cubits wide, made of gopher wood, and covered with pitch on the inside and the outside." He turned back and read again slowly and carefully. He threw down his Bible and said, "Brethren and sisters, I have been reading the Scriptures and searching them diligently for a long time, but I never came across this passage before. It only convinces my mind of the truth of that other wonderful passage in this book which says that man is fearfully and wonderfully made, and especially is it so with a woman." Don't let them paste the leaves of the Amendment together, but make them read it all and read it right, and when it is all read and all understood every patriot in North Carolina will vote for it and support it, because it is just and right, and what the people of North Carolina want. (Here Section 4 of the Amendment is read.) You see at once that that disfranchises the negro. He cannot read the Constitution; he cannot write it. Let an election officer read to him some such passage in the Constitution as this: "The privileges of the writ of habeas corpus shall never be suspended." What does he know about the Constitution or the writ of habeas corpus? What does he care about it? He has never tried to know anything about it and never will know anything about it. This one section will wipe out the negro vote in North Carolina. Of the 120,000 negro voters it will disfranchise 110,000 of them, practically all of them. It will be good-bye to all negro office holders, and all those who base their hope of office on the negro vote. It will be good-bye to Mr. Butler and all men who pander to the prejudice and ignorance of the negro for the offices they hold. No wonder they are against it. It means their political annihilation. It sends them into nothingness, out of which they ought never to have arisen. But unfortunately while it would disfranchise practically all of the negroes this section would disfranchise many good white men, for unfortunately there are many good white men in this State who cannot read and write. They have never had the opportunity to learn. During their boyhood and young manhood they or their fathers stood in the lines of battle in the vanguard of the Army of Northern Virginia, and so we did not stop at the fourth section. Many of the best men in North Carolina cannot read and write. When I left my home in Eastern North Carolina and went beyond the Blue Ridge to enter upon the work of life, I did not know a man in that country. The first man who met me and gave me the right hand of welcome was Lafayette Burnett. He is not educated. He is a brave mountaineer, the descendant of a noble race of mountain pioneers. He and his three brothers shouldered their muskets when the drums beat the morning reveille of 1861, and never laid down their arms until the roll of the last drum at Appomattox. Two of his brothers never came home. He stands six feet, and weighs 200 pounds. He is every inch a man and every ounce a hero. When he was told by one of these Republicans that the Democrats had formulated a measure that would disfranchise him he said that he knew it was a lie, because he knew that the Democrats would take care of him, but that if it was necessary to disfranchise him in order to save his brethren of the east—the men and the sons of the men with whom he fought from '61 to '65—he for one, would be willing to be disfranchised.

When this measure was under consideration in the hall of the House of Representatives, there sat in that hall an old man with gray hair and gray beard. He too was a soldier. His face had been burned in the battle smoke that blazed from Mission Ridge. He bore upon his bosom, scars that were made by the bayonets that blazed on the fields of war. His name was Alfred Holt. He thought that this was an educational qualification pure and simple. With tears streaming down his face he declared that if it were necessary to disfranchise him to redeem North Carolina, that he too was willing to be disfranchised.

My unlettered friend, I come here today to tell you that the Democratic Party did not forget you and Lafayette Burnett and Alfred Holt. They remembered you, yes, though you be a Republican who have opposed and villified the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders; though you be a Populist that have said hard things about your Democratic neighbor, we forgot not you. If you belong to the great brotherhood of the Anglo-Saxon race we have made a provision for you. We are standing by you. One hundred and seventy-five thousand Democrats have recorded their vow that you shall never be disfranchised. The arms of 175,000 white men are around and about you. We stand in a solid phalanx. We are marching in ranks that cannot be broken. And so, after we wrote Section 4, we wrote Section 5. (Here Section 5 is read.) Could you vote prior to 1867? If you could, you can vote now. Did you have a father or a grandfather or a great- grandfather who could vote prior to that time? Your rights are not interfered with. You may not know who your father was, but if you know who your mother was, or your grandmother, you are provided for. You can plant yourself on Section 5 and demand your right as a sovereign citizen. No power on earth can take it from you. Your great heritage is guaranteed to you under this Constitution. There is only one kind of a white man in North Carolina that will be disfranchised, and that is the white man who, when the day comes and the books are open, goes up and denies his race and his color; surrenders the inheritance from his fathers, goes back upon his daddy and his grand-daddy, and his mammy and his grand-mammy, and swears that he is a negro or the son of a negro, or the grandson of a negro, and that white man will be disfranchised.

But they say that this is unconstitutional, and Section 5 will be stricken out, leaving Section 4 to stand. These revenue officers and stillhouse raiders have suddenly bloomed out into great constitutional lawyers. There is not a lawyer of respectability in North Carolina, not a single one, who declared this unconstitutional, unless that lawyer is holding office by means of the negro vote. On the other hand, all the eminent lawyers in North Carolina, whether they be Republicans or Democrats or Populists, have declared this measure constitutional. Major Guthrie, the leading Populist lawyer in North Carolina—Judge Purnell, Tom Argo, Tom Settle—able Republican lawyers and judges, and all great men who adorn the bench and bar of this State, have pronounced this measure constitutional. But these men must hide their diminished heads in the presence of revenue officers! What do they care about the Constitution? It is a new thing under the sun for Republicans to be upholding the sanctity of the Constitution. When it was necessary to disfranchise the white men of North Carolina and enfranchise the negroes of North Carolina, they denounced the Constitution as a league with Death and a covenant with Hell. They trampled down the Constitution. They care no more for it than they do for a filthy rag. What do these revenue officers know about the Constitution? They would not know the Constitution from a camel with two humps on his back. I have heard a story about two fellows migrating to the West in a covered wagon. While they were driving across the great prairies they came to the track of the Western Union Pacific Railway. Jim says to Tom, "What's this?" Tom says, "Why, this; I know what this is. This is something you tie your wagon to of nights to keep the cyclone from blowing it away." Tom knew everything. Jim said he 'lowed that that was what it was, and as it was about night they decided to camp. They pulled and hauled their wagon until finally it landed right down between the rails. Tom says, "There, by gum, I told you so. I knowed what it was made for. Don't you see it fits to a gnat's heel?" And so they tied their wheels to the track and lashed it with ropes and got in the wagon and went to sleep. In the night they heard a mighty rumble. Tom nudged Jim in the side and said, "Jim, the cyclone is coming, but we're all right." The rumbling came nearer, and sounded like the voice of thunder. By and by a bright light climbed over the edge of the horizon, bright as a steady flash of lightning. Nearer it came. It was the west-bound vestibule limited, sweeping over the prairie at the rate of sixty miles an hour. The engine screamed in terror. Tom he burst out of one side of the wagon, Jim out of the other, and the train dashed it into ten thousand pieces. Tom stood off and got his breath and said, "Jim, I was just somewhat mistaken about that thing. I bet that thing that passed along here was that durn Constitutional Amendment." And these fellows know just as much about the Constitution as Tom did about the Pacific Railway track.

If it be unconstitutional at all it is so because it is in conflict with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which declares that the right to vote shall not de denied or abridged on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. This Amendment to our Constitution says nothing about race, color, or previous condition of servitude. If a negro can read and write he is allowed to vote just as a white man is. Or if he had a father or a grandfather who could vote he is allowed that privilege. The free negroes in this State could vote prior to 1835, and all negroes who can show their descent from these free negroes are allowed this privilege under the fifth section, and can demand their rights under it. If there is a negro in North Carolina, and there are doubtless some, though he was a slave, if he had a negro father or a negro grandfather who lived in the State of Massachusetts, and that ancestor of his could vote in the State of Massachusetts, he can vote in North Carolina under this Section 5. The color line is not drawn. No man is disfranchised on account of his race, color or previous condition of servitude, but under Section 5 he is given the right to vote as an inheritance, and not on account of his race. It puts the negro in North Carolina on an equality before the law with all foreign born races, on an equality with the Irishman, the Englishman and the German, and surely he is entitled to and can claim no more rights than these descendants of those great races. Take a woman, an unmarried woman over twenty-one years of age. She may have property, she may pay her taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property. She is subject to all the burdens of government that a man is. She is a citizen of the United States, and she has all the priviliges of a citizen of the United States. But the law of North Carolina takes from her the right to vote, disfranchises her on account of her sex. That is not unconstitutional, and why; because it does not disfranchise her on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Surely she is entitled to as many privileges in the eye of the law as the illiterate, foreign, negro race. Take a boy under twenty-one. He may have property. He has to pay his taxes, yet he is not allowed to vote because of his age. The State is absolute sovereign as to qualifications of a voter, with these three exceptions, race, color and previous condition of servitude. And this Amendment disfranchises nobody on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. The illiterate negro is disfranchised because he has not inherited the same privileges as the white man, and he ought not to inherit that privilege. In the State of Massachusetts the law allows no man to vote unless he can read and write, or unless he could vote prior to the first day of May, 1857. That is ten years before the date fixed in our Amendment, and no one has ever questioned the constitutionality of that law. If there were 100,000 negroes in Massachusetts, would it make that law any less constitutional? It would be questioned, if Russell and Butler lived in Massachusetts, and their only hope of office was to get that 100,000 negro votes. The Constitution of Mississippi has disfranchised the negro in that State. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that the Constitutional Convention of Mississippi swept the field of expedients for the purpose of disfranchising the negro, yet the Court upheld that Constitution because, as they said, the negro was not disfranchised on account of his race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In Louisiana they have practically the same amendment as we have. That amendment has been in force for two years. There are members in Congress now elected under that amendment. A Governor has been elected under it. Why has not that been declared un- constitutional? * * *

But this is not the greatest reason, there is no danger that a white man will be disfranchised under this Amendment. The white people of North Carolina now have the right to vote under Section 5 of the Constitution. Section 5 is repealed by this Amendment, but the very same act that repeals Section 5 inserts this Amendment in its place, and this Amendment guarantees to the white man the right to vote with as much sanctity as the old section did. The old Section 5 is repealed on the condition—on the solemn agreement by the people of a Sovereign State, that the new Section 5 takes its place. You have entered into a solemn contract and covenant with your State that Section 5 be repealed on this condition. To take the right from you would be an iniquity, a diabolical wrong, and yet they tell you that the Supreme Court of the United States, the greatest judicial tribunal in the world, a tribunal sitting there to guarantee justice and equality to all men, to uphold the supreme law of right, will perpetrate this diabolical fraud and wrong; that this Court that stamped the Civil Rights Bill, by which the Republicans attempted to put the negro on an equality with the white man ; this Court that has declared Beckham the Governor of Kentucky, because the people of Kentucky had decided that he was Governor; this Court that upheld the Constitution of Mississippi, that upheld the School Law of Georgia, which divided the negroes and the whites; which has upheld the Election Law of South Carolina, which is more stringent against the negro than ours; that this great Court will violate its rule of law and justice, and take from you a right guaranteed to you by all solemnities of your Constitution. Such an Act would be the end of Republican Government. Like Samson, in blind rage, to do this they would have to take hold of the pillars of the State and pull down the whole fabric of the Federal system. They would have to destroy the very cornerstone of the Republic. I denounce it as a slander and the vilest imputation upon this great tribunal. No one wants to disfranchise you, my illiterate friend, and no one can disfranchise you. If the illiterate white man in North Carolina should be thus unjustly disfranchised it would create riot and civil war, and every white man in North Carolina, except these revenue officers and negro politicians, would stand at your side to defend your rights with the last drop of their blood. You can disfranchise negroes, but you cannot disfranchise white people. * * *

They also object to the clause in the Amendment providing for the payment of the poll tax. There is no new poll tax levied. The Constitution guarantees that the poll tax shall not exceed two dollars, that no man more than fifty years of age is liable to poll tax, and that if he be physically disabled or too poor to pay it, he is not liable for it. This Amendment provides that the able-bodied man under fifty years of age, able to pay his poll tax, shall pay that tax on or before the first day of March of the year in which he proposes to vote for the preceding year—six months after its date. And here is the able-bodied man under fifty, able to pay his poll tax. He enjoys all the blessings of our Government. He lives in a State that builds your school houses, your court houses, your public roads, asylums for the unfortunate. She stations the law as a sentinel around your door in the night time. She protects your property with the strong arm of the law, and you enjoy it all. You live in a great Government that would expend untold millions of its treasures and send its fleets and armies to the uttermost parts of the earth to assert your manhood and maintain your rights, and you enjoy it all. You accept all of these privileges, and it is all paid for out of money that is taken out of the pockets of your neighbors by taxation. And yet these Republicans say that you able-bodied man, under fifty years, able to pay your poll tax, are not willing to do it. It is a slander on the poor manhood of North Carolina. It is an appeal to the dishonesty of the poor people, a contemptible demogogic appeal that will be repudiated. * * * The poor people of this country are not the ones who escape the payment of taxes. It is the rich, who can hide their wealth on the tax-levying day. The poor man cannot hide his head. He has to pay his taxes, and he is willing to do it. But if he is not willing, and wants to enjoy all the benefits of this Government that are paid for by the neighbor just as poor as he is—if there be such a man in North Carolina, and I do not believe there is—that man ought to be disfranchised. * * *

They also object to the clause in the Amendment providing that after 1908 all persons who have not registered at that time must know how to read and write. If you get your name on the registration book before 1908 you will not be troubled to register any more. You have the right to vote guaranteed to you forever. Your name is enrolled in the capital, and that roll will stay there as a memorial of the great inheritance that you have received from your fathers. I may be able to read and write the Constitution, but I am not going to vote that way. I am going to vote because my ancestors could vote. I will have my name enrolled in the capital along with those of my race who are less fortunate than I am, and we can always vote, and never have the trouble to register any more. * * *

But boys under thirteen years of age will not become twenty-one until after 1908, and so they cannot register under the Grandfather Clause. They will have to read and write. These Republicans tell us that there are white boys in North Carolina who will be disfranchised. * * * I am not afraid for the white boys of North Carolina to run an intellectual race with the kinky heads of North Carolina, and I would be unwilling that this clause be stricken out of our Amendment. * * * I would be unwilling that a great inducement should be offered to the negroes of North Carolina to become educated, while a great inducement should be offered to the white boys of North Carolina to remain forever ignorant. When the white boys of North Carolina know that before they can vote they must know how to read and write you cannot prevent them from learning. * * * They learn it while they rest at noon from the labors on the farm. They learn it by pine knots at night. And here in North Carolina, where we have a splendid public school system, and C. B. Aycock, the next Governor of North Carolina, promises to use all the power of the administration to guarantee every boy an education, it is an insult to boys to say that they will not take advantage of that opportunity. * * *

In 1908 there is not a boy who is now under thirteen years of age who will not be educated. We will have an educated citizenship, a citizenship that understands the Constitution and Government of their country. We will have a purer Government, and wiser and juster laws. These boys are not cowards, either. They are not afraid of this. They have read in their school histories that this great privilege of the franchise was not given to our fathers. It was won by the shedding of the most costly blood that ever crimsoned this world, by the sacrifice of the most heroic lives that ever saved humanity. They have read that their ancestors 800 years ago stood at Runnymede with sword in hand, and defied the king and the armies of the king, and forced him to sign the great Charter of English liberties, and they have stood from that day to this ready to defend their rights. And they tell me that these boys will not learn how to read and write to preserve for themselves the legacy that has been handed down to them from their fathers. This young Anglo-Saxon race in whose veins flows the blood of the men of the Revolution! There is no man in all this land that will say that his boy cannot and will not learn. * * * If there be such a man he is unworthy of that boy, and that boy will stand up here today and repudiate that statement. The Democratic Party wishes to educate and elevate the manhood of the State. The Republicans would keep them forever in ignorance. * * *

Perhaps it would not be improper to ask when the Republicans got to be the friends of the poor white men of this country? There was a time when the poor white people needed sympahty and support. Sherman's army had marched to the sea through North Carolina, and left behind it nothing but smoking ruins and wasted country. Around every fireside in North Carolina there was a vacant chair. The young boy that filled it was in an unknown grave in Northern Virginia. North Carolina had felt upon her bosom the tread of embattled hosts. She had felt to the very quick the scourge of avenging armies. Tears were pent up in the silent desolation of mothers and widows and sisters. All our people were poor, and yet in that day of grief and distress and poverty, these men who are today pitying the poor, sat in the high places of power and luxury. They rode in the second Chariot. They dwelt in the house of feasting while we were in the house of mourning. While we wept they laughed and danced and rejoiced. Now when the poor white people of North Carolina are somewhat recovered from the scourge that they brought upon this State they are pitying our poverty and illiteracy. It is not the first time in the history of the world that the hypocrite has used the cause of the poor to accomplish his vile designs. You remember that when the Master was worn and weary by traveling over the burning, scorching desert, He went into the house of the rich Pharisee to rest. While He and His disciples were there, there came in, unannounced, unbidden, all disheveled, all unworthy and all unwelcome too, the poor, despised outcast woman. She saw the stony faces of the Pharisees, but when she caught a glimpse of that ineffable face of love she burst into tears and fell down at His feet and washed them in those tears and wiped them with her disheveled hair. She broke open the alabaster box of precious ointment. It was all she had. She annointed His feet with the costly oil. There was one in all that company that saw unmoved. He raised his voice against it and rebuked her. He said that this ointment ought to have been sold for much, and the money given to the poor. That was Judas, who wanted to steal the money. * * *

My illiterate friend, how came you to be illiterate? You are illiterate because you never had the opportunity of an education. At the time when you would have been at school you had on a suit of gray; and a confederate musket on your shoulder. You were in the storm of war. But while you and your brothers and your fathers were in a distant land, you had a great friend down here in North Carolina. He was the greatest friend that the poor man ever had. He glorified the poor manhood of this State, for he himself came from the loins of the poor manhood. He glorified the Democratic Party too, for he himself lived and died a Democrat. While you were fighting the battles of your country, old Zeb. Vance, by honesty and frugality, had accumulated a school fund of $450,000, and had it laid away in the public treasury. It was yours. It was there to educate you and your children when you came back from the war. It was your priceless heritage. But as soon as the war was over, by means of the negro vote, the Republicans got into power. They laid their unholy hands upon that sacred fund, and stole and squandered the last cent of it and ran away. School houses were closed because the money was stolen. You had no opportunity to get an education, because they stole that money. Now they are pitying you because you are illiterate. They are like the fellow that was indicted for murdering his father and mother, and stood up in open court and confessed his guilt and when the judge asked him what he had to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him according to law, he said, "I hope Your Honor will have mercy on the poor orphan that stands before you." You have been robbed, you are the disinherited heirs of a great estate, and these men who are today pitying you for your illiteracy are the ones who are responsible for that wrong, that great misfortune. And now these men are trying to invoke the name of Zeb. Vance, and say they are following in the footsteps of Vance, these men—they denounced him and reviled him and slandered him while he lived! They would have stoned him to death. It is not the first time, either, in the history of the world that a generation of vipers has been ready to build the tombs of prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous. They shall not invoke the name of Zeb. Vance! They shall build no tomb to his memory! You miserable demagogue, he denounced you, too, while he lived. He stigmatized you with infamy. I wish that the great old Senator were living today, that he could speak one word to the people of North Carolina; that from those lips of love, and melting pity and greatness, and fiery wrath, there could come one blast. He would make it more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment, than for you in North Carolina. But the Stately Ship is gone to the "haven under the hill" —

"Oh, for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!"

I submit that the negro has no right to vote. He has the right to vote neither by constitutional enactment nor by inheritance, nor has he deserved that right by a proper use of it. In 1867, in flagrant outrage of the Constitution, by a military edict, he was given that right, and 20,000 white men in North Carolina were disfranchised by the Republican Party at the point of a bloody bayonet. In defiance of the Constitution, the negroes were enfranchised and the white people were disfranchised, and by that despotic military law the negro ratified the Cander Constitution, which guarantees to him the right to vote. He hardly knew what he was doing when he voted himself the right to vote. They say that down here in Eastern North Carolina, at the first election held under the Reconstruction Acts, when the negroes voted for the first time, they swarmed around that ballot box in great numbers. They say that down here at one of these voting precincts on that day, there was a man who had rat poison to sell. He thought it was a good time to advertise and sell his poison, and so he was standing up in the crowd talking up his drug and advertising it, by distributing among the crowd little circulars with the picture of a rat, that had taken some of this poison. The rat was dead and laid out in fine shape, and the negroes got hold of this rat circular and got it confused with their tickets and began to vote it, and they were shoving them into the ballot box just by the thousands. Along towards night one old coon went up to the leader and said, "Look here, there must be something wrong about this thing; I don't believe this is no 'publican ticket. This thing got nothing but a dead rat on it." The negro said, "You fool, that is a 'publican ticket, the very thing you want. Vote that ticket and it means that you vote for to ratify the Constitution." It was with such voters as these that the Canby Constitution was ratified, and the votes were taken to South Carolina and counted in Charleston by Gen. Canby, the Military Governor in North Carolina.

The negroes certainly did not inherit the right to vote, because they, nor their ancestors, have ever won or deserved that right. In all the ages they have never shed one single drop of blood for the liberties and the privileges which we enjoy. In all our history they have never laid one stone upon another in this great fabric of our Government.

Have they used the privilege so as to entitle them to the right to it? The man that was given ten talents so used them that he acquired the ownership. How has the negro used this talent? They were given the right to vote in 1867, and in two years they bankrupted North Carolina. They plunged the State into a debt of forty millions of dollars, and the men that they had elected wasted and squandered the money, and applied not a cent of it to the good of the State. They built no railroads, they made no internal improvements. The poor were not cared for, the innocent and blind lay in dungeons or wandered in the fields. There was no government in North Carolina, either. The course of the law was ended. The sword, and not the sword of the military captain, either, but the sword of the bandit and the cut-throat, stood chief magisstrate in this State. The writ of habeas corpus was suspended. Bands of armed men went up and down the State. The authorities were powerless. It was worse than civil war. They made this land a desolation and called it peace. There was a veritable reign of terror. The sun of law and justice was in total eclipse for two years. Political night had come, and all manner of beasts of prey came forth to pillage and to devour. These political hyenas and jackals ravaged this old State of our fathers. These were the dark days in North Carolina's history.

To the east of the city in which I live there is a little mountain called Beaucatcher. It is called that from the fact that from time immemorial the boys and girls have gone there to loiter on its beautiful summit, and tell to each other that old story that never grows old. I have stood on that mountain in the early morning, and looked beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains over the land where lie the ashes of my fathers. I have seen the day break beyond the eternal hills; the mountains give forth their forms from out the bosom of the darkness; from the dewy branch little snowbirds here and and there with deep warble salute the coming sun—"Stars fade out and galaxies—street lamps of the City of God." Clouds of the night storm are lifted up on sheens of fire and rolled back in pillars of flame. When far overhead they are caught up by the morning breeze and swept away, perfect day is established, and there is peace. So did the morning come to North Carolina in 1870, when a Democratic Legislature was elected; breaking into the splendors of the day in 1876, when the cohorts of the unterrified came forth to redeem North Carolina, led by that lion of the tribe of Democracy, old Zeb. Vance. Peace came to North Carolina, sweet as "day spring to the shipwrecked in Nova Zembla." It came to the exasperated hearts of our people like strains of music. The law was restored, good government was administered. Great Governors were in the Executive Mansion, and great and pure men administered justice with an even hand alike to all, the great and the small, the white and the black. In every district a school house was opened, in every town a school house was built for the white boys and girls. Though the Democrats of North Carolina owned all the property and paid all the taxes, they built a school house for the little negroes, too. Asylums were built for the insane, the deaf, the dumb and the blind, and every time we built an asylum for the unfortunate of our race, when necessity demanded we built one for the unfortunate of the colored race. It was generosity unequalled in history. It was good government unexampled in the jurisprudence of the world. Twenty-five years passed away. A generation passed away. We forgot the evil days of 1867 and 1869. We not only forgot but we forgave. The Republicans confessed their sins and said they would not do so any more. Yes, we forgot. We must not forget any more.

"Lord, God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget."

But we did forget. We were like the old preacher said to his congregation. He read in the Scriptures, "Abraham forgot Isaac, and Isaac forgot Jacob, and Jacob forgot his twelve sons." He said, "Brethren and sisters, they were a forgetful people in those days." And we were a forgetful people. For twenty-five years we had fought at every door and room and hall in this house of rest to keep this gang out. At the end of twenty-five years they broke in again, and here they were—the same old crowd, the same old days of 1867 and 1869. A little fellow was reading his Sunday School lesson to his teacher. He came across the names Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego. He could not pronounce them. The teacher asked him why he didn't know his lesson. He didn't know why he didn't know it, but he could not pronounce those names. The teacher told them to him, and he went on. Pretty soon he came to the names again, and hung fire the second time. The teacher told him to go on. He could not go. The teacher said, "Now that is Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, and if you don't know those names the next time you come to them I will thrash you like fury." The little fellow read on. After awhile he came to them again. The teacher told him to go on, and asked him what was the matter. The little fellow broke out crying and said, "Here is them three scoundrels again." And so here they were again, worse than they were before. They turned this State over to the negroes, and the allies of the negroes. They turned the fairest cities of the East over to their control. The East swarmed with negro office holders. In the County of New Hanover there were forty negro magistrates, and in the city of Wilmington there were seventeen negro policemen and deputy sheriffs. Negro postmasters were in most of the leading cities of the East. The white people could not and would not suffer it. Bloodshed and riot prevailed wherever negro domination prevailed. The Wilmington riot came. It will come every time in North Carolina when the negro attempts to rule the white man, and if he has the majority and is entitled to vote he is entitled to rule. These men prostituted every institution in North Carolina save one to the greed of the office seeker. Our asylums are the most sacred institutions in the State. Take the hospital for the insane at Morganton. I stood the other day beneath the dome of that magnificent building of brick and stone and marble, and as I stood there and saw floating from its dome the ensign of our Commonwealth, I was proud that I was a citizen of this great State, and belonged to the great party that built it. The words of the great Judge came to my mind. They say those words shall be spoken when the great Prince of Peace and the King at the Day of Judgment shall sit upon His throne of suns and stars and pronounce the final judgment to all the sons of men. "I was afflicted and ye ministered unto me," and when some shall ask when this was done, I think that He will point to the poor, the insane, the deaf and dumb and blind, and say to the people of North Carolina, "Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my little ones, you did it unto me." There are little children in North Carolina that never have seen the light of morning break over the hills; they have never seen the beautiful tint of the rosebud. They have never hunted for four leaf clovers. They have never played with the little ones on the lawn. They have never looked up and seen the ineffable love that beams on a mother's face. They have never seen God's rainbow spanning earth and heaven, like a chariot race for the angels to ascend and descend. North Carolina built a home for them. It employed teachers, that they might move their fingers over the raised letters and learn to be enlightened men and women.

In all ages of the world there have been places of sanctuary. We read in the Bible that around the Holy City there were cities called Cities of Refuge, and though a man had stained his hand in the blood of his fellow man, if he fled fast enough and got within the gates of a city of refuge he was safe, because the avenger of blood could pursue no further. Victor Hugo tells us a story of the dark ages. A beautiful young girl named Esmeralda was tried for witchcraft in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris. There on the judgment seat sat the Inquisitor. Here was the beautiful girl. Around her roared and raged the mob of Paris, howling for her blood. She was asked what had she to say. In her innocence she said, "I am not guilty." They bared her beautiful limb and placed upon her knee the instrument of torture, and pressed it. She shrieked in pain, but in her innocence she said, "I will not confess. Have mercy." There was no mercy there. Again they pressed the instrument of torture, and in her anguish the poor, frail, tender nature broke down. She said, "I confess, but oh, have mercy." There was no mercy there. They bared her beautiful neck for the executioner's knife, and were preparing for the bloody work. All this time Quasimodo, the hunchback bell ringer of Notre Dame, was watching this scene from one of the balconies above. He let down a rope, and with the nimbleness of a cat slid down, and in the twinkling of an eye grabbed Esmeralda in his arms and ran along the balconies of Notre Dame, crying "Sanctuary, Sanctuary." Before him the wild, infuriated mob of Paris stood back. There was no bloodthirsty villain that dared violate this Temple of the Sanctuary. But in 1895 and 1897 there was no place of sanctuary in North Carolina. They attempted to break into the asylums. They sent Jim Young, a negro, into that temple which we had built for the deaf and dumb and blind children of North Carolina. They engraved his name in marble on the cornerstone as an everlasting monument to their infamy. The Democratic Legislature of 1899 took a chisel of cold steel and took out that name, but the scar remains. This Amendment to our Constitution will forever prevent the recurrence of such times of infamy and disgrace to the white people of this State.

It is no accident that every time the negroes get in control we have bad government and anarchy and bloodshed. They stand in a solid phalanx 120,000 strong, and have stood that way for twenty-five years. If you wish to find the lowest type of the human race, whether it be man or woman, go to that quarter of the city where whites and negroes associate together on terms of social equality. There you will find humanity crawling in the filthiest slime of moral and social degradation. If you wish to find the lowest type of a public man, a man who aspires to place and power, it is the man who associates on terms of political equality with the negroes, who will go to their night meetings and appeal to their ignorance and prejudice and race hatred. Here stands this body of 120,000 voters. Unfortunately there are many white men in North Carolina who will be tempted by the emoluments and power of public office to ally themselves with these negroes. It is the only way that they can control them. With such white leaders they are always a threat to the State, and when the people become careless and inattentive they slip into power. They must obey the dictates of their masters who placed them there, and then we have negro rule, or what is worse than negro rule, the rule of the renegade white man. The people of North Carolina will not submit to such government. If they should become indifferent and submit, it would be worse than war and pestilence and famine. The scorching winds and untimely frost may wither and blight your grain fields, and kill the corn and wheat and fruitage, but God's rain and sunshine will again clothe hill and mead in verdure, and harvest fields will wave in golden splendor. The desolating spirit of war may breathe upon this land as it has done, and leave nothing in its wake but desolation and tears, and mothers and sisters in mourning, but the olive branch of peace will grow, battle flags will be furled; on the fields of death, the roses of summer will bloom in perennial beauty, and from the soil consecrated by the blood of the brave a nobler race will come. But over such degradation of the manhood and the womanhood of this State as would come from negro domination and negro equality, there would come no rejuvenating spring. The white people of North Carolina do not intend that the negroes shall rule this State. If the negroes are entitled to vote, in every locality, in every city where they have a majority they are entitled to govern. If they are entitled to vote they are entitled to govern Wilmington, Newbern, and many of the fairest sections in North Carolina. We know that this is a lie, a glaring lie, a lie that burns into the heart of every white man in North Carolina, and they will not endure it. When the armies of Louis XIV were marching towards Holland, and it seemed as if the power of the great king was invincible, William, Prince of Orange, called the State's Generals together, and in solemn council they determined that sooner than the armies of their ancient enemy should overrun their country, they would cut loose the dykes and let the ocean roll in; that nothing should be seen above the waves except the towers and steeples of the cities of Holland. We too have come to the same unconquerable determination that an alien race shall not overrun and rule this State of our inheritance.

The negro was not born to govern. In the scale of humanity he stands the lowest, the Anglo-Saxon the highest. Consider the poor man, if you please, the one gallus fellow, with no hat on, or his hair sticking through a hat with no top to it. He may not know anything about books. He may be careless, indifferent as to his condition, but that man has flowing in his veins the blood of fifty generations of slave governing ancestors. He has behind him two thousand years of brave manhood and you rouse him, let a negro assert superiority and the right to rule him, and that man is like a devil turned loose. He will not submit to it. We read in Tacitus that 2,000 years ago, on the banks of the Rhine, our forefathers, a race of naked, half armed barbarians, died before the legions of Caesar, but not a man surrendered. It was this blood that thundered in the veins of Cromwell and the soldiers of the Covenant, when on Marston Moor and Naseby Field they drove in headlong, right to the arms of the aliens. It was these men who stood like a granite wall at Waterloo, against which the far glancing chivalry of France, the Grand Army and the Old Guard of the Emperor, broke like surges against a rock. It was our ancestors who reclaimed this New World, who drove back the savage. Before their pioneer axes primeval forests fell down. The eastern marsh and the mountain wilderness were transformed into wide seed fields and steepled cities. In all ages they have gone forth, not as Rome sent forth her legions, to conquer, rule and crush, but to civilize and Christianize, to lay the foundation of great States and Empires and Republics, to establish Constitutional Government and administer equity to the weak.

And you men assembled here today bear testimony with me. I say it in memory of the glorious traditions of the past. I say it by the right arms of one hundred thousand Anglo-Saxon men, by the prayers of one hundred thousand Anglo-Saxon women. I swear it by the indominitable courage of the men who met the peril at Gettysburg and Bull Run, by the bones of our brothers, that are sleeping in the battlescarred bosom of old Virginia. I say it by warrant of Him who ordains in Omnipotence the order of Dominion. I say that North Carolina is the heritage of the white man, and shall forever be ruled by the white race.