lican committee,
at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, I used the language attributed
to me as follows: 'And now you are asked to surrender all you have
done into the hands of Wade Hampton and the Ku-Klux, and the little
segment in the north that is called the Democratic party.' In
reply, I have to advise you, that while I do not remember the
precise language, I presume the reporter correctly stated, in a
condensed way, his idea of what I said. I no doubt spoke of you
as the leading representative of the Democratic party in the south,
and referred to the Ku-Klux Klan as the representative of the
barbarous agencies by which the Democrats have subverted the civil
and political rights of the Republicans of the south.

"I did not connect you personally with the Ku-Klux Klan. Indeed,
I knew that you had, in one or two important instances, resisted
and defeated its worst impulses. I appreciate the sense of honor
which makes you shrink from being named in connection with it.
Still, you and your associates, leading men in the south, now enjoy
benefits of political power derived from the atrocities of the Ku-
Klux Klan, in which phrase I include all the numerous _aliases_ by
which it has, from time to time, been known in the south. Your
power in the southern states rests upon the actual crimes of every
grade in the code of crimes--from murder to the meanest form of
ballot-box stuffing committed by the Ku-Klux Klan and its kindred
associates, and, as you know, some of the worst of them were
committed since 1877, when you and your associates gave the most
solemn assurance of protection to the freedmen of the south.

"These crimes are all aimed at the civil political rights of
Republicans in the south, and, as I believe, but for these agencies,
the very state that you represent, as well as many other states in
the south, would be represented, both in the Senate and House, by
Republicans. But for these crimes the boast attributed to you,
that one hundred and thirty-eight solid southern votes would be
cast for the Democratic ticket, would be but idle vaporing; but
now we feel that it is a sober truth.

"While I have no reason to believe that you or your northern
associates personally participated in the offenses I have named,
yet, while you and they enjoy the fruits of these crimes, you may,
in logic and morals be classed as I classed you, as joint copartners
with the Ku-Klux Klan in the policy which thus far has been succe