on upon the
people, was their greatest sin. The agrarian movement took them unawares.
They were unable to realize that between the South of 1890 and another,
older South, there was a great gap. They could not interpret the
half-coherent speech of the small farmer, who had come to feel that he had
been wronged and struck out blindly at those whom he had previously
trusted. New and unknown men appeared in Washington to take the place of
men whose character, ability, and length of service had made them
national figures. The governorship of the States went to men whose chief
qualifications seemed to be prominence in the affairs of the Alliance or
else bitter tongues.

Though the Populists, for the most part, returned to the Democratic
party, and the suffrage amendments, which will be mentioned presently,
made the possibility of Republican success extremely remote, the "old
guard" has never regained its former position. In all the Southern
States party control has been for years in the hands of the common man.
The men he chooses to office are those who understand his psychology and
can speak his language. Real primary elections were common in the South
years before they were introduced elsewhere, and the man who is the
choice of the majority in the Democratic primary wins.

Some of the men chosen to high office in the State and nation are men of
ability and high character, who recall the best traditions of Southern
statesmanship; others are parochial and mediocre; and some are blatant
demagogues who bring discredit upon their State and their section and
who cannot be restrained from "talking for Buncombe."

The election of a Democratic President in 1884 had stirred the
smoldering distrust of the South on the part of the North. The
well-known fact that the negro vote in the South did not have the
influence its numbers warranted aroused the North to demand a Federal
elections law, which was voiced by bills introduced by Senator Hoar of
Massachusetts and by Henry Cabot Lodge, then a member of the House of
Representatives. Lodge's bill, which was passed by the House in 1890,
permitted Federal officials to supervise and control congressional
elections. This so-called "Force Bill" was bitterly opposed by the
Southerners and was finally defeated in the Senate by the aid of the
votes of the silver Senators from the West, but the escape was so narrow
that it set Southerners to finding another way of suppressing the negro
vote than