With both of these influences at work and all the forces of modern life playing upon the keener section of the colored population, nothing but congenital disabilities can prevent a movement which ruling persons, North and South, will have to take into account. How serious this movement becomes depends, however, upon the innate capacity of colored masses to throw off the shiftlessness and indifference to high standards of life that, their best friends admit, stand in the way of their gaining a substantial economic basis, without which any kind of a solid political superstructure is impossible. The real negro question now is: "Can the race demonstrate that capacity for sustained economic activity and permanent organization which has lifted the white masses from serfdom?"
[1] In 1894 the Democrats during Cleveland's administration completed the demolition of the system by repealing the remaining provisions.
[2] Disfranchising provisions were adopted in other southern states as follows: North Carolina, in 1900; Alabama and Virginia, in 1901; Georgia, in 1908. See Lobingier, _The People's Law_, pp. 301 ff.; W. F. Dodd, _Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions_.
[3] _The Political Science Review_, November, 1906, p. 20.
[5] See a Massachusetts case decided before the Civil War upholding similar discriminations against negroes. Thayer, _Cases on Constitutional Law_, Vol. I, p. 576.
[6] This is partly due to the absence of compulsory attendance laws.
Long before the Civil War, steam and machinery had begun to invade American industries and statesmen of the new commercial and industrial order had appeared in Washington. The census of 1860 reported nearly a million and a half wage earners in the United States, and more than a billion dollars invested in manufacturing. By that year over thirty thousand miles of railway had been constructed, including such important lines as the New York Central, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania. Politicians of the type of Stephen A. Douglas, who discussed slavery in public and devoted their less obvious activities to securing grants of public lands and mineral resources to railway and manufacturing corporations, had begun to elbow the more cultivated and respectable leaders like Calhoun, Webster, and Alexander Stephens, who belonged to the old order.