Yet to-day their standing both as citizens and as Christians is opposed.  The question of their rights is discussed as if it were an open one, and in the South it is coming to be increasingly denied.  Under the plea that it is unsafe for the black man to exercise his civil rights, there arises a condition of affairs that can have no standing under our government except a revolutionary standing.  And the question whether the rights of man as man shall be regarded, is to-day a more pressing question than it has been at any previous time since the slaves were declared to be men.

The Southern press, which both creates and voices public opinion, reveals an attitude of mind increasingly hostile to the equal civil rights of the black man, for the simple reason that he is not white, which is calculated to fill the friends of American institutions with gravest apprehensions, and which demands the serious attention of us all.  Almost every week discloses to us the fact that intimidation, oppression and violence do override the government of the land, in its application to the Negro people.  Influential Southern journals have pronounced the Fifteenth Amendment a living threat to the civilization of the South, and declare that Christian statesmanship demands its abrogation.

A thoughtful book published in New York, written in a calm and judicial tone by an able lawyer in Virginia, in its chapter upon the future of the Negro, says:  “The social aspect of the Negro suffrage is certain to grow more threatening as the blacks increase.  The motives which have led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment in force in the age to follow.  To day the rapid increase of the black population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European monarchies.  The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the South, then to the prosperity of the Union.”  This is a temperate expression of much Southern opinion.

Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem.

Six months ago we could quote from an editorial column written by an ex-Confederate officer for an influential Democratic paper in the South these words:  “The duty of the white people of the South is plain.  In the spirit of noblesse oblige we must sympathize with those who are fitting the colored people for the duties of life, remembering what the Negroes were to our forefathers and what our forefathers were to them.  No one can doubt that a Negro has a soul to save.  That admitted, he is as much entitled