John Tyler Morgan
the African and the white race the bar to union is still more absolute. To remove it, if it could be removed, would be to lower the whites to the level of the intellectual, moral, and social condition of the Negroes. It would be to destroy the white race. One drop of Negro blood known to exist in the veins of a woman in this country draws her down to the social status of the Negro, and impresses upon her whole life the stamp of the fateful Negro caste, though she may rival the Easter lily in the whiteness of her skin. The Negroes, though they may accept almost any form of association with the whites, are never satis fied with any admixture of the blood of the races. It relaxes the hold of their own race upon their affections. Negroes of mixed blood are inferior among the race to which they belong. It is irrational to attribute these race antipathies and aver sions to the laws of this country or to anything in the manner of their administration and enforcement. They rest upon founda tions that men have not built, and are supported by ordinances that human power can neither enact nor amend nor repeal. After we have done all that we can to abolish or to neutralize these race distinctions and the feelings that grow out of them  attempt ing to set aside the eternal laws of nature  we shall find that we have only marked more plainly the differences between the races, and that we have rooted race prejudices more deeply in the hearts of the inferior races and the whites, at least so far as the Chinese and Negroes are concerned. The Negro question is not, therefore, a southern question, but a race question, that appears in every phase of human existence as distinctly in the North, wherever a considerable number of Negroes is found, as in the South.
