f 1 ■:.■::. Class _£Xi>3_3^ Book kJL3 ^ L_ji_ Copyright^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. CfatAd y^ ^X^i^ cusCd /\f the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for perpetual generations. I do set my bow- in the clouds and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth that the bow The Scourging of a Race, 55 shall be seen in the cloud and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud and I will look upon it that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth." So God makes an eternal covenant with the re- deemed of earth. He says : "I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish. " "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God, and I will write upon him my new name." Every believer has entered into this eternal covenant relationship with God. And when he thinks of his Redeemer, he remembers that his redemption is for- ever sure, for there is a "rainbow," a seal and token of his redemption, "round and about the throne." To no class of people has God committed himself like the redeemed. He keeps them as "the apple of His eye," and "under the shadow of His wing." He walls around them a wall of fire, and says, "They shall be mine when I come to make up my jewels." The appearance of this rainbow was mild in color, familiar in form, and magnificent in general appear- ance. So God comes to the saint, the fairest among ten thousand and altogether lovely. The Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the valley; the bright and Morning Star. He comes beating back clouds and darkness and spreading the efifulgent rays of the golden glories of the New Jerusalem until the soul, entranced by His beauty and enraptured by His glory, cries : "Holy, 56 The Scourging of a Race. holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbaoth, the whole earth is full of thy glory !" But the apostle carries us a step farther : "Around and about the throne were four and twenty seats, and four and twenty elders sat upon them, clothed in white raiment, with golden crowns upon their heads." Note the fact : These seats so near the throne were not empty, nor filled with angelic orders, but with elders, four and twenty in number, to represent the church of the Old and New Testament, in a special sense and the whole body of the redeemed in a gen- eral sense. For they wore white raiment, symbols of the purity of their lives, made so by being washed in the blood of the Lamb. Their sitting denotes their honor, rest, and satisfaction. Sitting around the throne, to show their nearness to God ; sitting, gazing upon the great- ness of His being and studying the perfection of His nature ; sitting, entranced with His goodness and grace and noting the wondrous ease with which He carries on the affairs of His government ; sitting, so near that they might hear the rustling of His mediatorial robes and trace the transcendent beauty of the divine form and face. O the sacred privilege! O the honored place ! Slaves once to sin, now exalted with a high seat, around the throne. Rebels, against heaven, now sitting in His peaceful presence, where they might see His face continually and become the most conspicuous of all heaven. They are the redeemed. And as angelic legions, flit by upon errands of love, they point them out, saying: "These are they that came up through great tribulations and washed their robes and made them clean in the blood of the Lamb." The prophet tells us : "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." The Scourging of a Race, 57 And .so the redeemed of God shine in heaven, dis- tinguished by white raiment and golden crowns. Dis- tinguished by reason of consecrated service down upon the battlefields of sin and strife. Do you not think that sainted patriarchs, like Abraham, the father of the faithful; Jacob, the angel wrestler; Moses, the lawgiver; Joseph, the child of providence; Daniel, the hero of the lion's den, will not be distinguished in heaven ; nor the Hebrew boys who walked amidst the seven-fold heated furnace; Isaiah, the silvery-tongued advocate of the Redeemer's kingdom; David, Israel's sweet singer, will not attract special attention amidst the heavenly host? Do you not know that John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness; the four evangelists, who recorded for all time the earthly his- tory of Jesus ; Peter, the impulsive, but intrepid apostle and advocate for God in the midst of Pentecostal showers; Paul, once persecutor, now prosecutor of the King's business, with a host of martyrs, whose blood became the seed of the church, reinforced by Calvin, Latimer, Wycliffe, John Wesley, Luther, Bunyan, Chrysostom, Carey, and an innumerable host of sainted worthies, shall be pointed out in heaven? Yes, yes, they shall have seats of honor. Not be- cause of what they did, but because of what Jesus did for them. Crowns were upon this celestial eldership's head. Crowns of victory. Victory over a mean, wicked, deceitful heart. Victory over a nature, warped, twisted and scarred by sin, until it became as a royal castle in ruins. Victory over sin, with all its forms and phases ; its secret plotting and hellish designs ; its deadly and damning destruction ; its strife, misery, envy, and deceit. Victory over that arch fiend of the soul — Satan, whose chief design is to destroy the souls of men. Victory over Satan, who transforms himself into an angel of light that he may deceive the very elect. Victory over his Satanic Majesty. 58 The Scourging of a Race. "Hkri the Almighty power HuiT-d headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion Down to bottomless perdition; there to dwell, In adamantine chains and penal fires." The apostle saw the redeemed crowned, already vic- torious, upon every battlefield. Heaven belongs to the saints. It is the gift of God. Redemption and eternal salvation from sin and its consequences, stand for the same. Once saved always saved, is the song of the redeemed upon earth and the anthem of praise in eternity. The Scourging of a Race, 59 Citizenship, Suffrage and the Negro. Delivered Before the Baptist Ministers' Conference, Phila- delphia, Pa., 1903. A writer in one of our great magazines has this to say: It is a curious fact that, in selecting the alien and somewhat ambiguous term "citizen" for a title of in- dividual membership of the new nation, the fathers of the republic neither defined that iterm nor indicated a preference for any one of its various definitions then current. This could hardly "have been the result of accident or oversight. The framers of the Constitu- tion were, with few exceptions, scholarly and pains- taking men. They were familiar with the idioms and legal technicalities of our language, critical and often fastidious in their choice of words, and rarely em- ployed a phrase or constructed a sentence of doubtful meaning. Moreover, they were conscious that their work would be subjected to the closest scrutiny by the sev- eral State conventions which were to pass judgment upon it. How, then, shall we account for their un- qualified use of a term which had acquired as many shades of meaning as Proteus had shapes, and which, they must have foreseen, was to become the storm center of future political and judicial controversy? The answer to this question does not seem far to seek. In the first place, it should be remembered that not one 60 The Scourging of a Race. of the many definitions of the term "citizen" then cur- rent would have accurately described the then existing relation between any one of the thirteen States and its inhabitants. The States had been .self-governing com- munities for about eleven years. But it was a question whether the citizen owed primary allegiance to the par- ticular State in which he resided, or whether he owed it to the Revolutionary government, of which the Con- federation was the immediate successor ; and, in either case, his exact relation to the governing power was not very clear. In the next place, wide differences of opinion prevailed among the members of the conven- tion respecting the relation that should be established between the citizen and the proposed new Federal gov- ernment. One faction wanted to establish a central power bearing directly upon the individual citizen. The other, having an undefined dread of something which they called "consolidation," wanted merely to patch up the weak points in the old Articles of Confederation. The ideal of the one was a nation in fact as well as in name ; the ideal of the other was a league or com- pact between independent communities. One sought to make the citizen a member of the nation ; the other sought to make him a member only of the particular State in which he resided. It is plain, therefore, that any definition of the term that would have been satis- factory to one faction would have been obnoxious to the other. The only hope of agreement lay in the line of some compromise; and the most available, if not the only, compromise was to leave the technical import of the phrase "Citizen of the United States" to be evolved from future experience, and to be de- veloped with the gradual growth of a more clearly de- fined national sentiment. Take, for illustration, Aristotle's definition of the term, which is, perhaps, neither better nor worse than a number of others then in common use. "A citizen," he tells us, "is one to whom belongs the right of taking The Scourging of a Race. 61 part in both the deliberative and judicial proceedings of the community of which he is a member/' If in- terpreted literally, this would exclude all females from citizenship, which is absurd. And if to avoid this absurdity, we assume, as we reasonably may, that the masculine pronoun, "he," was employed in a generic sense, we then have the naked assumption that every citizen, regardless of age, sex, condition, degree of in- telligence, or personal responsibility, has "the right of participation" in both the legislative and judicial pro- ceedings of the community — a proposition that would have horrified even the extremest radical democrat in the convention. Even the verbal distinction which the fathers made between the terms "citizen" and "subject" gives us but a faint clue to their reasons for selecting the former instead of the latter. Manifestly, they wish to indi- cate a self-governing State as distinguished from an autocracy, an aristocracy or a monarchy. But we can- not say, with Aristotle, that a "subject is merely gov- erned, whereas a citizen also governs." For in Eng- land, many subjects "also govern;" that is, they have the right of the elective franchise. In that sense, they are "citizens." In the States of the United States many citizens are merely governed ; that is, they have not, and never had, the right of suffrage. In that sense they are "subjects." There are, then, as there have always been, two classes of citizens and two classes of subjects — namely: one which has, and one which has not, the right of participation in the afifairs.of government, or, as we would say, the right to vote. And, since each sustains identical relations to its respective government, one general definition will comprehend both. That is to say, any native-born or naturalized person of either sex, or of whatever condition, entitled to full protec- tion in the exercise of all the natural or personal rights incident to membership of the State or nation, is a 62 The Scourging of a Race, citizen or subject — the choice of terms being imma- terial. But there is, ;as there has always been, a broad distinction between these natural or personal rights and the right of participation, personally or by a chosen representative in the affairs of government. One is inherent in citizenship ; the other is a gift conferred by the State. In the Greek democracies, all citizens were neither legislators nor magistrates ; still less were they ever both at the same time. All Roman citizens were not qualified electors. In the Dutch republic, citizenship and suffrage were never inseparable; in point of fact, less than half the citi- zens were ever voters. In the Swiss cantons, suffrage was never co-extensive with citizenship. In the re- public of France, less than half the citizens have, or ever have had, a voice in the government. Even in the Latin-American republics, 'where there has been the nearest approach to universal suffrage, where women have all the natural rights inherent in citizenship, and even the nationality of the son follows that of the mother instead of the father, no woman has ever been a voter. In the United States, women are citizens, entitled to all the natural rights incident to that relation; yet no woman has ever exercised the elective franchise in virtue of her citizenship. Where she has voted at all, it has been in virtue of an enabling act of the legisla- ture. In a word, it is an axiom of our law, illustrated by numerous judicial decisions, that the right to vote is not an essential element of citizenship; that a per- son may be a citizen, entitled to all the privileges and immunities incident to citizenship, without having the right to vote. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein he resides." Every student of political science will accept the Constitution as authority for citizenship in the repub- The Scourging of a Race, 63 lie. Birth and naturalization are therefore the funda- mental qualifications of American citizenship. It gives to its possessor a constituent membership in a great community ; vesting in him a title to all civil and politi- cal rights, asserted and secured by American institu- tions, securing to him the absolute protection of the government at home and abroad, in the enjoyment of life and liberty; making him a citizen of the State wherein he resides, and guaranteeing to him, upon the honor of the State, the absolute right of suffrage, as the weapon with which he may destroy all discriminat- ing Jaws, that menace his personal liberty and the highest good of the community; and an instrument with which (he may eliminate unjust laws; relegating to "innocuous desuetude" rotten and corrupt adminis- trations and forever asserting the sovereignty of citi- zenship as well as speedily and surely contributing to the element of a high and exalted civilization. Every civilization has its destructive and preserva- ' tive elements. Citizenship must see to it that the one is destroyed and the other promoted. It cannot rise higher than its source. Every people that has deeply impressed itself upon the human family has repre- sented one great idea, which has directed its life and formed its civilization. The Egyptian stood for life, the Persian light, the Hebrew purity, the Greek beauty, the Roman law, and the Anglo-Saxon liberty. Thomas Jefferson said, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." This is true of every man, no matter what his color or condition. Freedom is the precursor of civilization in a republic; its basis is nature; its standard is justice; its protection is law; it is bounded alone by the golden words of the Mas- ter, "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you." The founders of this nation fought first to break the shackles of English tyranny, to unfetter the spirit of a people, who under God were destined to play an 64 The Scourging of a Race. important part in the development of a new world; they turned their attention next to the adoption of an instrument that should define what liberty meant and secure these blessings to (themselves and 'their posterity. The civilized world knows how well they succeeded. It is mot strange that the American Negro should find himself facing the hot fires of persecution and contend- ing, too, for an unfettered manhood, as have every other people. It has . always been slowly guaranteed and given only when the race, by patient suffering and nobility of life, has demonstrated its right to live. To place any suffrage qualifications upon citizenship is to abridge the privilege or immunity of such citizen- ship — logical fallacy and political trickery would make it appear that the right to vote 'remains, yes, upon the same principle that it is the right of the common laborer to take the place of the capitalist, but the barriers placed in his way are so heavy; his wages kept so small, that he dies without ever accomplishing it. So in restricting or qualifying voters in the South, while it would make no difference to the Negro, for in that section he is thrifty and of more average in- telligence than his white neighbor, yet it violates the principles of a democracy, taking the government from the hands of the many and placing it in the hands of the few. The disfranchisement of the Negro is rank injustice, born of prejudice and race hatred. Everybody knows that the ballot placed in the Negro's hands is the badge of his citizenship, and has been no more -abused by him than by the army of foreigners who are by political trickery and methods of perjury "made ready for voting" in State and National elec- tions. The attempt to qualify electors either by educa- tion or property qualifications or to keep back the growing numbers who desire to exercise the first and highest right of citizenship is a thing that the framers of the Constitution had never dreamed of. That a country of such boasted freedom and humanitarianism The Scourging of a Race. 65 should resort to these methods only shows how low it is possible for partisan politicians and low grade statesmen to stoop. The disfranchisement of any class of citizens must inevitably lead to dreadful civil and political complica- tion, creating sectional inequalities of enormous mag- nitude and ignoring 'the safeguard against the same, which reads : "Section i. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immuni- ties of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "Sec. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective num- bers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians .not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the 'choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judi- cial Officers of a State, or the members of the Legisla- ture -thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, •the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty- one years of age in such State." Our first attempt at a constitutional definition of the phrase "Citizen of the United States" was made after a somewhat stormy experience of about eig i hty years. I allude, of course, to the joint resolution of the Thirty- ninth Congress of June 16, 1866, proposing what is 6a. 66 The Scourging of a Race. now known as the Fourteenth Amendment. It was subsequently ratified by the requisite number of States ; and, on the 21st day of July, 1866, was officially pro- claimed as -an integral part of our fundamental law. The first section of that amendment declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." And, in due course, each of the particular States, con- forming to this definition, so amended their code as to declare, in substance, that " all citizens of the United States, (residing in the State, are citizens of the State," thus excluding, by plain implication, all who are not citizens of the United States. This has been characterized as "a revolution in our form of government." It was not quite that. But it was a turning point in our constitutional and political history, and marked the advent of a new era in the evolution of American citizenship. Up to that time we searched in vain for some clear and authentic definition of the familiar but doubtful phrase, "Citi- zenship of the United States." It could be found neither in our fundamental or statutory law, nor in any of the decisions of our Supreme Court. Nor could it be de- rived from the concurrent actions or rulings of any two of the co-ordinate departments of the government. In its elements and its details, citizenship of the United States was as little understood and as much open to speculative criticism in 1861 as it was in 1787. For more than three-quarters of a century it had been an adjourned question whether a person could be a citizen of the United States at all except as he was such incidentally, and then only in a limited or qualified sense, by reason of his being a citizen of one of the particular States. It was, therefore, an open question whether the ultimate allegiance of the citizen was due to the State or to the general government. Indeed, Mr. Calhoun and other exponents of the so- The Scourging of a Race. 67 called Jeffersonian itbeory of the Constitution had gone so far as to contend that there was "no isuch thing as citizenship of the United States," per se : "'that a person born and living in the District of Columbia or other Territory of the Union, although in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, was not, in reality, a citizen of the United States." And, absurd as the proposition now seems, it had never been fairly met by any adverse decision of our Supreme Court. The Fourteenth Amendment settled, as it was in- tended to settle, this vexed question at once and for- ever. It established a citizenship of the United States that is wholly independent of States lines. It thus created authority commanding the common obedience of its individual members, and, for the first time, made us a nation in fact as well as in name. A person may now be a citizen of the United States without being a citizen of any one particular State ; but by no con- ceivable combination of circumstances can he be a citizen of one of the particular States till he is first a citizen of the United States. Now what is the offset of these flagrant violations of law? It lies in the Congress and the Republican party. In the men who represent justice and equity in that body. They must see to it that such men are elected as will raise their voice against this unequal representation. They know it exists and have not the stamina to attack it. Will the North and East stand supinely by and give the right hand of fellowship to men who stand for as much in a disfranchised district as those who are constitutionally represented? Or will they call a halt, and say to all vote-stealing States, When your representatives are elected by the people of your States we will bail them in the halls of Con- gress, but we ask them to stand back until then ? What is the difference between Smoot, of Utah, and Ben Tillman, of South Carolina ? One stands for adultery and the other for theft, both of which are condemned 68 The Scourging of a Race. by the decalogue. One is not allowed a seat because of -the protest of all ithe people against his alleged polygamous relations ; the other is allowed both a seat and a voice, disgracing the United States Senate with his foul and nauseating slanders against decency and respectability, and posing as a sorry spectacle to the world of how possible it is for common dogs to get into dignified company. These and other cases are a sad commentary upon American politics and canot escape the ridicule of other nations. America must remember that -the eyes of the civilized world are upon