But when the war was over, and the Southern nobility turned its thoughts once more to social arrogance and political dominion, it found that Othello’s occupation was entirely gone.  A revolution had swept over the country more iconoclastic and merciless than that which followed in the wake of the French revolution nearly a hundred years before.  The bottom rail had been violently placed upon the top; industrial adjustments had been so completely metamorphosed as to defy detection; while the basis and the method of political representation and administration had been so altered as to confound both the old and the new forces.

Aside from the ignorance of the black citizens and the insatiate greed and unscrupulousness of their carpet-bag leaders—­a band of vultures more voracious and depraved than any which ever before imposed upon and abused the confidence of a credulous people—­the white men of the South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all.  It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine court for fit parallel.

But, as I have said, a love of power easily degenerates into treason.  If we may not call the violence, the assassinations, which have disgraced the South, treason by what fitter name, pray, shall we call it?  If the nullification of the letter and spirit of the amendments of the Federal Constitution by the conquered South was not renewed treason, what was it?  What is it?

The white men of the South, to the “manor born,” having shown their superiority in the superlative excellencies of murder, usurpation and robbery (and I maintain they have gone further in the execution of these infamies than was true of the Negro-Carpet-bag bacchanalia); having made majorities dwindle into iotas and vaulted themselves into power at the point of the shot gun and dagger (regular bandit style); having made laws which discriminate odiously against one class while giving the utmost immunity to the other; having, after doing these things, modeled the government they rule upon the pro-slavery doctrine that it is a “white man’s government”—­having had time to become sobered, the white men of the South should be open to reason, if not to conviction.

The black men of the South know full well that they were disfranchised by illegal and violent methods; they know that laws are purposely framed to defraud and to oppress them.  This is dangerous knowledge, dangerous to the black and the white man.  It will be decided by one of two courses—­wise and judicious statesmanship or bloody and disastrous insurrection.  When men are wronged they appeal either to the arbitrament of reason or of violence.  No man who loves his country would sanction violence in the adjudication of rights save as a last resort.  Reason is the safest tribunal before which to arraign injustice and wrong; but it is not always possible to reach this tribunal.