There could be but one answer to the question, and it came in thunders of applause. Colonel French heard the speech, smiled at the old arguments, but felt a sudden gravity at the deep-seated feeling which they evoked. He remembered hearing, when a boy, the same arguments. They had served their purpose once before, with other issues, to plunge the South into war and consequent disaster. Had the lesson been in vain? He did not see the justice nor the expediency of the proposed anti-Negro agitation. But he was not in politics, and confined his protests to argument with his friends, who listened but were not convinced.
Behind closed doors, more than one of the prominent citizens admitted that the campaign was all wrong; that the issues were unjust and reactionary, and that the best interests of the State lay in uplifting every element of the people rather than selecting some one class for discouragement and degradation, and that the white race could hold its own, with the Negroes or against them, in any conceivable state of political equality. They listened to the colonel's quiet argument that no State could be freer or greater or more enlightened than the average of its citizenship, and that any restriction of rights that rested upon anything but impartial justice, was bound to re-act, as slavery had done, upon the prosperity and progress of the State. They listened, which the colonel regarded as a great point gained, and they agreed in part, and he could almost understand why they let their feelings govern their reason and their judgment, and said no word to prevent an unfair and unconstitutional scheme from going forward to a successful issue. He knew that for a white man to declare, in such a community, for equal rights or equal justice for the Negro, or to take the Negro's side in any case where the race issue was raised, was to court social ostracism and political death, or, if the feeling provoked were strong enough, an even more complete form of extinction.
So the colonel was patient, and meant to be prudent. His own arguments avoided the stirring up of prejudice, and were directed to the higher motives and deeper principles which underlie society, in the light of which humanity is more than race, and the welfare of the State above that of any man or set of men within it; it being an axiom as true in statesmanship as in mathematics, that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. Content to await the uplifting power of industry and enlightenment, and supremely confident of the result, the colonel went serenely forward in his work of sowing that others might reap.