What vital principle affecting our citizenship is championed by the National Republican party of to-day?  Is it a fair vote and an honest count?  Measure our strength in the South and gaze upon the solitary expression of our citizenship in the halls of the National Legislature.  The fair vote which we cast for Rutherford B. Hayes seemed to have incurred the enmity of that chief Executive, and he and his advisers turned the colored voters of the South over to the bloodthirsty minority of that section.

The Republican party has degenerated into an ignoble scramble for place and power.  It has forgotten the principles for which Sumner contended, and for which Lincoln died.  It betrayed the cause for which Douglass, Garrison and others labored, in the blind policy it pursued in reconstructing the rebellious States.  It made slaves freemen and freemen slaves in the same breath by conferring the franchise and withholding the guarantees to insure its exercise; it betrayed its trust in permitting thousands of innocent men to be slaughtered without declaring the South in rebellion, and in pardoning murders, whom tardy justice had consigned to a felon’s dungeon.  It is even now powerless to insure an honest expression of the vote of the colored citizen.  For these things, I do not deem it binding upon colored men further to support the Republican party when other more advantageous affiliations can be formed.  And what of the Bourbon Democratic party?  There has not been, there is not now, nor will there ever be, any good thing in it for the colored man.  Bourbon Democracy is a curse to our land.  Any party is a curse which arrays itself in opposition to human freedom, to the universal brotherhood of man.  No colored man can ever claim truthfully to be a Bourbon Democrat.  It is a fundamental impossibility.  But he can be an independent, a progressive Democrat.

The hour has arrived when thoughtful colored men should cease to put their faith upon broken straws; when they should cease to be the willing tools of a treacherous and corrupt party; when they should cease to support men and measures which do not benefit them or the race; when they should cease to be duped by one faction and shot by the other.  The time has fully arrived when they should have their position in parties more fully defined, and when, by the ballot which they hold, they should force more respect for the rights of life and property.

To do this, they must adjust themselves to the altered condition which surrounds them.  They must make for themselves a place to stand.  In the politics of the country the colored vote must be made as uncertain a quantity as the German and Irish vote.  The color of their skin must cease to be an index to their political creed.  They must think less of “the party” and more of themselves; give less heed to a name and more heed to principles.

The black men and white men of the South have a common destiny.  Circumstances have brought them together and so interwoven their interests that nothing but a miracle can dissolve the link that binds them.  It is, therefore, to their mutual disadvantage that anything but sympathy and good will should prevail.  A reign of terror means a stagnation of all the energies of the people and a corruption of the fountains of law and justice.