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Do the friends of the negro suffrage take into consideration the
probability that every negro vote will be a vote in favor of
repudiation? In their anxiety to confer the franchise on the freedmen,
that circumstance may have been overlooked. The negroes, as a race, are
neither by nature or experience qualified to appreciate the relations
between debtor and creditor in a moral point of view; and it is not
likely that they will neglect an opportunity to vote themselves free from
the burdens of taxation. The negro rarely works voluntarily, except to
provide the necessaries of life, and to gratify his daily appetite for
little luxuries. When he finds that he has to work so much the harder to
assist in redeeming the financial pledges of the government, he will not
be found so sensitive in regard to the sanctity of the public national
debt as to sacrifice his personal ease and comfort before that crushing
financial Juggernaut.
But, perhaps, the Radicals, in so zealously urging negro suffrage, have
in view the probability of a popular sentiment in favor of repudiation.
They see, perhaps, that the masses are beginning to chafe under the
pressure of enormous taxes. They appreciate, perhaps, the difficulty of
preserving the inviolability of a debt that the debtors have the power to
cancel by a given number of slips of paper thrust into a ballot-box. It
is yet to be demonstrated that a government controlled by the popular
will, in which the people are sovereigns, will continue, throughout all
the changes of partisan sentiment and fortune, to acknowledge a public
debt that drains every ounce of revenue and swallows up the best part of
the profits of labor. It is fair to presume that, sooner or later, the
rallying cry of some political party will be repudiation, and in that
event the partisans of that measure may rely upon the negro vote.--New
York News |