half to two
They believed that peace , prosperity , and popular education offered a surer remedy for social ills than the reopening of issues supposed to have been settled . There were timid men who shrank from civic strife . There were busy men , who had something else to do . There were a few fair men , prepared to admit , privately , that a class constituting half to two thirds of the population were fairly entitled to some representation in the law-making bodies . Perhaps there might have been found , somewhere in the state , a single white man ready to concede that all men were entitled to equal rights before the law . That there were some white men who had learned little and forgotten nothing goes without saying , for knowledge and wisdom are not impartially distributed among even the most favored race . There were ignorant and vicious negroes , and they had a monopoly of neither ignorance nor crime , for there were prosperous negroes and poverty-stricken whites .