ves. Then the horde of "carpet-baggers" descended upon the
"reconstructed" States, and there ensued a period of humiliation to the
South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper agonies
of the war. Coloured voters were brought in droves, by their Northern
fuglemen, to polling-places which were guarded by United States troops.
Utterly illiterate negroes crowded the benches of State legislatures. A
Northerner and staunch Union man has assured me that in the Capitol of
one of the reconstructed States he has seen a coloured representative
gravely studying a newspaper which he held upside down. The story goes
that in the legislature of Mississippi a negro majority, which had
opposed a certain bill, was suddenly brought round to it in a body by a
chance allusion to its "provisions," which they understood to mean
something to eat! This anecdote perhaps lacks evidence; but there can be
no doubt that the freedmen of 1865 were, as a body, entirely unfitted to
exercise the suffrage thrust upon them. A degrading and exasperating
struggle was the inevitable result--the whites of the South striving by
intimidation and chicanery to nullify the negro vote, the professional
politicians from the North battling, with the aid of the United States
troops, to render it effectual. Such a state of things was demoralising
to both parties, and in process of time the common sense of the North
revolted against it. United States troops no longer stood round the
ballot-boxes, and the South was suffered, in one way and another, to
throw off the "Dominion of Darkness." Different States modified their
constitutions in different ways. Many offices which had been elective
were made appointive. The general plan adopted of late years has been to
restrict the suffrage by means of a very simple test of intelligence,
the would-be voter being required to read a paragraph of the State
constitution and explain its meaning. The examiner, if one may put it
so, is the election judge, and he can admit or exclude a man at his
discretion. Thus illiterate whites are not necessarily deprived of the
suffrage. They may be quite intelligent men and responsible citizens,
who happened to grow to manhood precisely in the years when the war and
its sequels upset the whole system of public education in the South. At
any rate (it is argued), the illiterate white is a totally different man
from the illiterate negro. How far such modifications of the State
constitut