free community.  Against it, numbers and corruption cannot prevail.  It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force.  It is the inalienable right of every free community—­the just and righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage.  It is on this, sir, that we rely in the South.  Not the cowardly menace of mask or shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty.  That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it all the powers of earth shall not prevail.  It is just as certain that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white race—­that before the moral and material power of her people once more unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts—­as that night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun.  You may pass force bills, but they will not avail.  You may surrender your own liberties to federal election law; you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not exist, that the very form of this government may be changed; you may invite federal interference with the New England town meeting, that has been for a hundred years the guarantee of local government in America; this old State—­which holds in its charter the boast that it “is a free and independent commonwealth”—­may deliver its election machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create—­but never, sir, will a single State of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race.  We wrested our state governments from negro supremacy when the Federal drumbeat rolled closer to the ballot-box, and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free government.  But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district in the South, we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to prevent its reestablishment.

I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming estrangement to the North.  If, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the South, divided, may walk in peace and honor, I will take that path, though I take it alone—­for at its end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this Union.  But, sir, if the negro had not been enfranchised the South would have been divided and the Republic united.  His enfranchisement—­against which I enter no protest—­holds the South united and compact.  What solution, then, can we offer for the problem?  Time alone can disclose it to us.  We simply report progress, and ask your patience.  If the problem be solved at all—­and I firmly believe it will, though nowhere else has it been—­it will be solved by the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honor to its solution.