It is not to be expected now that the colored voters will continue to maintain that unanimity of idea and action characteristic of them when the legislative halls of States resounded with the clamor of law-makers of their creation, and when their breath flooded or depleted State treasuries.  The conditions are different now.  They find themselves citizens without a voice in the shapement of legislation; tax-payers without representation; men without leadership masterful enough to force respect from inferior numbers in some States, or to hold the balance of power in others.  They find themselves at the mercy of a relentless public opinion which tolerates but does not respect their existence as a voting force; but which, on the contrary, while recognizing their right to the free exercise of the suffrage, forbids such exercise at the point of the shotgun of the assassin, whom it not only nerves but shields in the perpetration of his lawless and infamous crimes.  And why is this?  Why is it that the one hundred and twenty thousand black voters of South Carolina allow the eighty thousand white voters of that State to grind the life out of them by laws more odious, more infamous, more tyrannical and subversive of manhood than any which depopulate the governments of the old world?  Is it because the white man is the created viceregent of government?  The Scriptures affirm that all are sprung from one parental stem.  Is it because he is the constitutionally invested oligarch of government?  The magna charta of our liberties affirms that “all men are created equal.”  Is it because the law of the land reserves unto him the dominance of power?  The preamble of the Federal Constitution declares that “We” and not “I,” constitute “the people of the United States.”  If the law of God and the law of man agree in the equality of right of man, explain to me the cause which keeps a superior force in subjection to a minority.  Look to the misgovernment of the Reconstruction period for the answer—­misgovernment by white men and black men who were lifted into a “little brief authority” by a mighty but unwieldy voting force.  That black man who connived at and shared in the corruption in the South which resulted in the subversion of the majority rule, is a traitor to his race and his country, wherever he may now be eking out a precarious and inglorious existence, and I have nothing to heap upon his head but the curses, the execrations of an injured people.  Like Benedict Arnold he should seek a garret in the desert of population, living unnoticed and without respect, where he might die without arousing the contempt of his people.