The Osceola Times

Supremacy of Intelligence.

Governor Fitzhugh Lee, of Virginia, was recently interviewed by a New York Herald reporter, upon the question of colored men holding office.

"It is not my problem," he said "When that Dutch vessel landed twenty African slaves on the banks of the James river a few years after the settlement of Virginia, that started the race question, and it has confronted us ever since. It will always be the foremost problem in the South, but it is impossible to get Northern people to look at it from our standpoint. Just think of it! Suppose a million negroes landed in New York city and became citizens. Then the minority--the intelligent whites--in attempting to conduct the municipal government properly would precipitate a great New York question." The Empire state has about seventy-five thousand colored population now, yet none of them represent any district in your legislature nor sit in the board of aldermen of the metropolis. If they were in the voting majority, would you like to have them govern you? Whichever way you contemplate the picture, it is not a pleasant one.

They are equal before the law-- nobody disputes that, nor attempt to quarrel with the constitution-- but they are not equal in the scale of human intelligence, in the race of natural progress, in the achievement of material prosperity nor in the social attribute; recognized by civilization.

We have been trying to educate them for twenty-five years, but they make little or no progress. Look at Liberia. The colored people have simply retrograded there and in Africa generally they have made no progress during all these centuries, and they probably had the same start which our ancestors had.

In Virginia the negroes are not qualified to govern and will never rule over the whites, you may rest assured of that, unless they are backed by federal bayonets enough to overturn the state and as between the two give us the rule of the musket in preference to that of the negro. This is the prompt choice of nine-tenths of the white Virginians to day. But every colored man has a free ballot and a fair count in our State. They vote just as they please and have several representatives in the legislature. and one or two counties have colored sheriffs Not one in a thousand is qualified, however to hold office. This is said in no captious spirit of criticism, but it is the plain truth concerning an inferior race. They are everywhere our neighbors and we treat them well. We have no quarrels with the negroes and there is no contest between us for supremacy. But Anglo-Saxons cannot allow them to govern, and will not, and the colored people understand this. What is a mystery to the northern mind is perfectly plain in the south. It is the peaceful and perpetual supremacy of intelligence.