At present even good Northern men, who wish to educate the Negroes, feel impelled to buy this privilege from the none too eager white South, by conceding away the civil and political rights of those whom they would benefit.  They have, indeed, gone farther than the Southerners themselves in approving the disfranchisement of the colored race.  Most Southern men, now that they have carried their point and disfranchised the Negro, are willing to admit, in the language of a recent number of the Charleston Evening Post, that “the attitude of the Southern white man toward the Negro is incompatible with the fundamental ideas of the republic.”  It remained for our Clevelands and Abbotts and Parkhursts to assure them that their unlawful course was right and justifiable, and for the most distinguished Negro leader to declare that “every revised Constitution throughout the Southern States has put a premium upon intelligence, ownership of property, thrift and character.”  So does every penitentiary sentence put a premium upon good conduct; but it is poor consolation to the one unjustly condemned, to be told that he may shorten his sentence somewhat by good behavior.  Dr. Booker T. Washington, whose language is quoted above, has, by his eminent services in the cause of education, won deserved renown.  If he has seemed, at times, to those jealous of the best things for their race, to decry the higher education, it can easily be borne in mind that his career is bound up in the success of an industrial school; hence any undue stress which he may put upon that branch of education may safely be ascribed to the natural zeal of the promoter, without detracting in any degree from the essential value of his teachings in favor of manual training, thrift and character-building.  But Mr. Washington’s prominence as an educational leader, among a race whose prominent leaders are so few, has at times forced him, perhaps reluctantly, to express himself in regard to the political condition of his people, and here his utterances have not always been so wise nor so happy.  He has declared himself in favor of a restricted suffrage, which at present means, for his own people, nothing less than complete loss of representation—­indeed it is only in that connection that the question has been seriously mooted; and he has advised them to go slow in seeking to enforce their civil and political rights, which, in effect, means silent submission to injustice.  Southern white men may applaud this advice as wise, because it fits in with their purposes; but Senator McEnery of Louisiana, in a recent article in the Independent, voices the Southern white opinion of such acquiescence when he says:  “What other race would have submitted so many years to slavery without complaint? What other race would have submitted so quietly to disfranchisement? These facts stamp his [the Negro’s] inferiority to the white race.”  The time to philosophize about the good there is in evil, is not while its correction is still possible, but, if at all, after all hope of correction is past.  Until then it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation.  To try to read any good thing into these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to accept them as an accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one’s race.  Those who commit crime should bear the odium.  It is not a pleasing spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber.  Silence were better.