Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 79

75. George A. Thacher, “The Southern Problem,” Forum (September 1901): 116-18.

Response to Josiah W. Bailey’s article entitled “The Case for the South,” in which Bailey defends the South’s disfranchisement of African Americans. “There can be no reasonable objection to an educational qualification for the franchise;” Thacher writes, “but a test of this kind ought to be a fair one, and it ought to apply to all citizens in the State. To allow an illiterate man to vote because his grandfather voted, and the debar another because of his ignorance, is for the law-making power to stultify itself and to destroy, by its own act, the respect of honest men.”