On the record
For many years they will be the hardest people in the civilized world to persuade into insurrection.
Said by
Whitelaw Reid
Source
gutenberg.orgWhitelaw Reid: “For many years they will be the hardest people in the civilized world to persuade into insurrection.”
Editor's note · Context
Reid describes the difficulty of persuading Southern people to rise up against the Union in the years following the Civil War.
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Our national experience has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad base of universal suffrage.
They should persist in this claim respectfully, but firmly, taking care to bring no discredit upon it by their own action.
Let me repeat, that I think it best for all men—white men, black men, and brown men, if you make that distinction, that all men of proper age and unconvicted of crime, should have the right of suffrage.
In this way they will surely overcome unjust hostility, and convince even the most prejudiced that the denial to them of any right which citizens may properly exercise is equally unwise and wrong.