Now, how did the Southern whites deal with this state of things?  Well, I am sorry to say they manifested their discontent very much in the way in which the Irish have for the last hundred years been manifesting theirs.  If, as the English opponents of Home Rule seem to think, readiness to commit outrages, and refusal to sympathize with the victims of outrages, indicate political incapacity, the whites of the South showed, in the period between 1866 and 1876, that they were utterly unfit to be entrusted with the work of self-government.  They could not rise openly in revolt because the United States troops were everywhere at the service of the carpet-baggers, for the suppression of armed resistance.  They did not send petitions to Congress, or write letters to the Northern newspapers, or hold indignation meetings.  They simply formed a huge secret society on the model of the “Molly Maguires” or “Moonlighters,” whose special function was to intimidate, flog, mutilate, or murder political opponents in the night time.  This society was called the “Ku-Klux Klan.”  Let me give some account of its operation, and I shall make it as brief as possible.  It had become so powerful in 1871 that President Grant in that year, in his message to Congress, declared that “a condition of things existed in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the mails and the collecting of the revenue dangerous.”  A Joint Select Committee of Congress was accordingly appointed, early in 1872, to “inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary States, so far as regards the execution of the laws and the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of the United States.”  Its report now lies before me, and it reads uncommonly like the speech of an Irish Secretary in the House of Commons bringing in a “Suppression of Crime Bill.”  The Committee say—­

“There is a remarkable concurrence of testimony to the effect that, in those of the late rebellious States into whose condition we have examined, the courts and juries administer justice between man and man in all ordinary cases, civil and criminal; and while there is this concurrence on this point, the evidence is equally decisive that redress cannot be obtained against those who commit crimes in disguise and at night.  The reasons assigned are that identification is difficult, almost impossible; that, when this is attempted, the combinations and oaths of the order come in and release the culprit by perjury, either upon the witness-stand or in the jury-box; and that the terror inspired by their acts, as well as the public sentiment in their favour in many localities, paralyzes the arm of civil power.

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