And thus it has been in all the history of murder and plunder.  Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and sacred to the race.  The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell, were they not drawn in the name of Liberty—­the People?  The guillotine of the French Commune and the derringer of J. Wilkes Booth, were they not inspired by Liberty—­the People?

The innocent blood which has been spilt in the name of liberty and the people, which has served the purposes of tyranny and riveted upon the people most galling chains, “would float a navy.”

By the side of the robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and unnecessary taxation upon the people of that state by the Carpet-Bag harpies, aided and abetted by the ignorant negroes whom our government had not given time to shake the dust of the cornfield from their feet before it invited them to seats in the chambers of legislature, we must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburgh and Ellenton.

By the side of the misgovernment, the honeycomb of corruption in which the Carpet-Bag government of Louisiana reveled, we must place the universal lawlessness which that state witnessed from 1867 to 1876.

The whole gamut of states could be run with the same deplorable, the same sickening conclusion.

The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to watch the fire-brand.  The “wise men” of the nation had made possible a system of government in which robbery and murder were to contend for the mastery, in which organized ignorance and organized brigandage were to contend for the right to rule and to ruin.

It is not complimentary to the white men of the South that their organized brigandage proved to be more stubborn, more far-sighted than was unorganized ignorance.  In a warfare of this disreputable nature very little honor can be accorded to the victorious party, be he brigand or ignoramus.  The warfare is absolutely devoid of principle, and, therefore, victory, any way it is twisted, is supremely dishonorable.

The South, therefore, although she rooted out the incubus of carpet-baggism (one of the most noxious plants that ever blossomed in the garden of any nascent society), and stifled the liberties and immunities of a whole people, turning their new-found joy into sadness and mourning—­although the South succeeded in accomplishing these results, she lies prostrate to-day, feared by her fellow-citizens, who will not trust her with power, and shunned by the industrious aliens who seek our shores, because they will not become members of a society in which individualism and absolutism are the supreme law—­for was it not to escape these parasites that they expatriated themselves from the shores of the Volga, the Danube