CIVIL WARS
America the disfranchisement was only partial. Its effects have been thus defined: "The highest social, class, the men of brains, character, and experience were disfranchised" … "Of the whites the illiterate were admitted, the intelligent excluded." At the same time the franchise was given to about 700,000 negroes, though in five States the negro voters outnumbered the whites. "No such mass," says the historian I have just quoted, "of political inexperience, of childish ignorance—no such 'terrible mass of inert domesticated barbarism ' was ever before in our country called upon to exercise the suffrage[1]."
As in England no settlement was attained till the old constitution was restored and the disfranchised royalists regained their rights, so in America none was possible till the excluded class were re-enfranchised and the reality of self-government restored to the Southern States.
Each of these settlements left later
- ↑ Rhodes, vi. 82.
49
