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 R