of the National Government, and his vote counted.  The South would have been no longer “solid”; the Southerners saw that the balance of power which they unlawfully held in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, based on the Negro population, would be wrested from them.  So they nick-named the pending elections law the “Force Bill”—­probably because it would force them to disgorge their ill-gotten political gains—­and defeated it.  While it was being discussed, the question was submitted to Miss Willard:  “What do you think of the race problem and the Force Bill?”

Said Miss Willard:  “Now, as to the ‘race problem’ in its minified, current meaning, I am a true lover of the southern people—­have spoken and worked in, perhaps, 200 of their towns and cities; have been taken into their love and confidence at scores of hospitable firesides; have heard them pour out their hearts in the splendid frankness of their impetuous natures.  And I have said to them at such times:  ’When I go North there will be wafted to you no word from pen or voice that is not loyal to what we are saying here and now.’  Going South, a woman, a temperance woman, and a Northern temperance woman—­three great barriers to their good will yonder—­I was received by them with a confidence that was one of the most delightful surprises of my life.  I think we have wronged the South, though we did not mean to do so.  The reason was, in part, that we had irreparably wronged ourselves by putting no safeguards on the ballot box at the North that would sift out alien illiterates.  They rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their sceptre.  It is not fair that they should vote, nor is it fair that a plantation Negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot.  We ought to have put an educational test upon that ballot from the first.  The Anglo-Saxon race will never submit to be dominated by the Negro so long as his altitude reaches no higher than the personal liberty of the saloon, and the power of appreciating the amount of liquor that a dollar will buy.  New England would no more submit to this than South Carolina.  ’Better whisky and more of it’ has been the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs in the Southern localities where local option was snowed under by the colored vote.  Temperance has no enemy like that, for it is unreasoning and unreasonable.  Tonight it promises in a great congregation to vote for temperance at the polls tomorrow; but tomorrow twenty-five cents changes that vote in favor of the liquor-seller.

“I pity the southerners, and I believe the great mass of them are as conscientious and kindly intentioned toward the colored man as an equal number of white church-members of the North.  Would-be demagogues lead the colored people to destruction.  Half-drunken white roughs murder them at the polls,