"The negro in every state where the race is very numerous," he wrote on January 7, 1909, "has been almost wholly disfranchised; and the disfranchisement is based on conditions and regulations not likely to be shaken for a long time, if ever. Negro domination, therefore, is no longer a bugbear or terror. . . . The experience of forty years has shown the greater North that the South must be left to manage this great matter for itself." Seven years earlier, when Republicans appointed a partisan committee to inquire into disfranchisement of Southern negroes, he condemned the plan as "useless and silly." "On this subject," he added, "there has been a mighty lot of experience during the past thirty-five years, and it is useless to challenge repetition of it" (March 23, 1902).
Not less useless and silly he deemed the negro question in the South. He called Southern fear of the negro and of Northern prejudice, "a strange nightmare" (November 11, 1904), and an antiquated prejudice. "Why should not the Southern people think of other things than the everlasting negro?" (November 11, 1904.) He pointed out repeatedly that the "nightmare" or "prejudice" was harmful to Southern progress; that it allied the South with repugnant notions of the Democratic Party of the North, such as free silver coinage, opposition to territorial expansion in 1898-1900, and socialistic hostility to private business and property. He could perceive in his last years the slow drift of the conservative South away from the radical Democratic Party of the North. But the change was so slow he would risk no prophesy as to proximity of the outcome. "The negro question," he wrote February 4, 1909, "was the source of the Civil War; it has been the main division of parties since; yet now that the Southern States are finding out they are no longer to be interfered with, in this most important of all matters that concern them, their natural conservatism on other matters asserts itself and takes a new course."
