citations from the cumbersome reports of the “Ku Klux conspiracy.”  Those reports are accessible to the reading public.  They tell the bloody story of the terrible miscarriage of the “Reconstruction policy;” they show how cruel men can be under conditions favorable to unbridled license, undeterred by the strong arm of constituted authority; they show how helpless the freed people were; how ignorant, how easily led by unscrupulous adventurers pretending to be friends and how easily murdered and overawed by veterans inured to the dangers and the toils of war; and, lastly, they show how powerless was the national government to protect its citizens’ rights, specifically defined by the Federal constitution. Was, do I say?  It is as powerless to day!

In this brief review, then, of the history and present political condition of the American Negro I cannot omit, though I shall not detail, the horrors of the Ku Klux period.  They are a link in the chain:  and though today’s links are different in form and guise, the chain is the same.  Let the reader, then, be a little patient at being reminded of things which he has perhaps forgotten.

CHAPTER VIII

The Nation Surrenders

The mind sickens in contemplating the mistakes of the “Reconstruction policy;” and the revolting peculation and crime—­which went hand in hand from 1867-8 to 1876, bankrupting and terrorizing those unfortunate States—­plunging them into all but anarchy, pure and simple.

A parallel to the terror which walked abroad in the South from 1866, down to 1876, and which is largely dominant in that section even unto the present hour, must be sought for in other lands than our own, where the iron hand of the tyrant, seated upon a throne, cemented with a thousand years of usurpation and the blood of millions of innocent victims, presses hard upon the necks of the high and the backs of the low; we must turn to the dynastic villanies of the house of Orleans or of Stuart, or that prototype of all that is tyrannical, sordid and inhuman, the Czar of all the Russias.  The “Invisible Empire,” with its “Knights of the White Camelia,” was as terrible as the “Empire” which Marat, Danton and Robespierre made for themselves, with this difference:  the “Knights of the White Camelia” were assassins and marauders who murdered and terrorized in defiance of all laws, human or divine, though claiming allegiance to both; while the Frenchmen regarded themselves as the lawful authority of the land and rejected utterly the Divine or “higher law.”  The one murdered men as highwaymen do, while the other murdered them under the cover of law and in the name of Liberty, in whose name, as Madame Roland exclaimed on the scaffold of revolutionary vengeance, so many crimes are perpetrated!  The one murdered kings and aristocrats to unshackle the limbs of the proletariat of France; the other murdered the proletariat of the South to re-rivet their chains upon the wretched survivors.  And each class of murders proclaimed that it was actuated by the motive of justice and humanity.  Liberty was the grand inspiration that steeled the arm and hardened the heart of each of the avengers!