When will the blacks cast a free ballot?  When ignorance anywhere is not dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and shiftless—­then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be free.  The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks—­not in sectional estrangement—­not in the hope of political dominion—­but in a deep and abiding necessity.  Here is this vast ignorant and purchasable vote—­clannish, credulous, impulsive, and passionate—­tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to the appeal of the stateman.  Wrongly started, in that it was led into alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even that information on which conviction must be based.  It must remain a faction—­strong enough in every community to control on the slightest division of the whites.  Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of both parties.  Its credulity is imposed upon, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses misdirected—­and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every approach to the ballot-box debauched.  It is against such campaigns as this—­the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every Southern community has drunk deeply—­that the white people of the South are banded together.  Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if 300,000 men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot—­banded in race instinct, holding against you the memory of a century of slavery, taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already travestied legislation from your State House, and in every species of folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.

But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote.  This has long been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on our part.  Let us see.  Virginia—­a state now under fierce assault for this alleged crime—­cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent of her vote; Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent of her vote.  Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts?  Last month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent of her vote; and Massachusetts, fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent of hers.  If Virginia is condemned because thirty-one per cent of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape, in which fifty-one per cent was dumb?