leaders and of the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites. In their need they asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic[Pg 7] and wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions. They prayed for peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there swept over them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nights and days, the season of their planting and the season of their reaping with terror and destruction, and they just out of the house of bondage. They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson in obedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we have seen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beating down and destroying constituted authority. Nor did they get any training in personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race. For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into the great and flourishing American art and industry of graft.

[Pg 7]

This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of the Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can be placed to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly be set down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To the carpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for the first time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right of each child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education at the hands of the state. These are two vital things which the South needed then and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed then and which their successors oppose to-day. That is what the whites did to educate the blacks during the most impressionable period of their new freedom in orderly government and in civilization. That was the way their education in citizenship and character building began and that was the way it proceeded until the year 1876.

In that year the two irreconcilable governments grappled in a final struggle at the polls for mastery and possession of that section. When the smoke of battle cleared over South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, the Southern forces of re-action were in complete possession of those states, and the solid South had become an accomplished fact. Nothing stood now between the blacks and their ancient enemy. They were again at the mercy of the old master class, who returned promptly to the execution of their interrupted program of inequality and injustice. As the whites 

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