oland exclaimed on the
scaffold of revolutionary vengeance, so many crimes are perpetrated!
The one murdered kings and aristocrats to unshackle the limbs of the
proletariat of France; the other murdered the proletariat of the South
to re-rivet their chains upon the wretched survivors. And each class
of murders proclaimed that it was actuated by the motive of _justice
and humanity_. Liberty was the grand inspiration that steeled the arm
and hardened the heart of each of the avengers!

And thus it has been in all the history of murder and plunder.
Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants
cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of
their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and
sacred to the race. The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell,
were they not drawn in the name of Liberty--the People? The guillotine
of the French Commune and the derringer of J. Wilkes Booth, were they
not inspired by Liberty--the People?

The innocent blood which has been spilt in the name of liberty and the
people, which has served the purposes of tyranny and riveted upon the
people most galling chains, "would float a navy."

By the side of the robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the
treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and
unnecessary taxation upon the people of that state by the Carpet-Bag
harpies, aided and abetted by the ignorant negroes whom our government
had not given time to shake the dust of the cornfield from their feet
before it invited them to seats in the chambers of legislature, we
must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburgh and Ellenton.

By the side of the misgovernment, the honeycomb of corruption in which
the Carpet-Bag government of Louisiana reveled, we must place the
universal lawlessness which that state witnessed from 1867 to 1876.

The whole gamut of states could be run with the same deplorable, the
same sickening conclusion.

The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to
watch the fire-brand. The "wise men" of the nation had made possible a
system of government in which robbery and murder were to contend for
the mastery, in which organized ignorance and organized brigandage
were to contend for the right to rule _and_ to ruin.

It is not complimentary to the white men of the South that their
organized brigandage proved to be more stubborn, more far-sighted than
was unorganized ign