orance. 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 and the Rhine? Men will not make
their homes among people who, spurning the accepted canons of justice
and the courts of law, make themselves a community of _banditti_.
Thus, the South lies prostrate, staggering beneath a load of
illiteracy sufficient to paralyze the energies of any people; dwelling
in the midst of usurpation, where law is suspended and individual
license is the standard authority; where criminals and suspected
criminals are turned over to the rude mercy of mobs, masked and
irresponsible; where caste corrupts every rivulet that issues from the
fountain of aspiration or of chastity;[13] where no man is allowed to
think or act for himself who does not conform his thoughts and shape
his actions to suit the censorious and haughty _dictum_ of the
dominant class.

"You must think as we think and act as we act, or you must go!" This
is the law of the South.

In each of the late rebellious states the ballotbox has been closed
against the black man. To reach it he is compelled to brave the
muzzles of a thousand rifles in the hands of silent sentinels who
esteem a human life as no more sacred than the serpent that drags his
tortuous length among the grasses of the field, and whose head mankind
is enjoined to crush.

The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal
constitution which grew out of the public sentiment created by thirty
long years of agitation of the abolitionists and of the "emancipation
proclamation"--issued as a