er, and the Southern nobility turned its
thoughts once more to social arrogance and political dominion, it
found that Othello's occupation was entirely gone. A revolution had
swept over the country more iconoclastic and merciless than that which
followed in the wake of the French revolution nearly a hundred years
before. The bottom rail had been violently placed upon the top;
industrial adjustments had been so completely metamorphosed as to defy
detection; while the basis and the method of political representation
and administration had been so altered as to confound both the old and
the new forces.

Aside from the ignorance of the black citizens and the insatiate greed
and unscrupulousness of their carpet-bag leaders--a band of vultures
more voracious and depraved than any which ever before imposed upon
and abused the confidence of a credulous people--the white men of the
South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the
factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject
class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that
exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the
part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine
court for fit parallel.

But, as I have said, a love of power easily degenerates into treason.
If we may not call the violence, the assassinations, which have
disgraced the South, _treason_ by what fitter name, pray, shall we
call it? If the nullification of the letter and spirit of the
amendments of the Federal Constitution by the conquered South was not
renewed _treason_, what was it? What is it?

The white men of the South, to the "manor born," having shown their
superiority in the superlative excellencies of murder, usurpation and
robbery (and I maintain they have gone further in the execution of
these infamies than was true of the Negro-Carpet-bag _bacchanalia_);
having made majorities dwindle into iotas and vaulted themselves into
power at the point of the shot gun and dagger (regular bandit style);
having made laws which discriminate odiously against one class while
giving the utmost immunity to the other; having, after doing these
things, modeled the government they rule upon the pro-slavery doctrine
that it is a "white man's government"--having had time to become
sobered, the white men of the South should be open to reason, if not
to conviction.

The black men of the South know full well that they were d