er, Newman, perhaps, has said that a man will not
become a martyr for the sake of an opinion; but Newman probably never
came in contact with the whipper-snappers of Exeter Hall, or their
prototypes in this country--the men who believe that philanthropy, and
reform, and progress generally are worthless unless it be accompanied by
strife, and hate, and, if possible, by bloodshed. You find the type
everywhere; it clings like a leech to the skirts of every great
movement. The Hotchkisses swarm wherever there is an opening for them,
and they always present the same general aspect. They are as productive
of isms as a fly is of maggots, and they live and die in the belief that
they are promoting the progress of the world; but if their success is to
be measured by their operations in the South during the reconstruction
period, the world would be much better off without them. They succeeded
in dedicating millions of human beings to misery and injustice, and
warped the minds of the whites to such an extent that they thought it
necessary to bring about peace and good order by means of various acute
forms of injustice and lawlessness.

Mr. Hotchkiss was absolutely sincere in believing that the generation
of Southern whites who were his contemporaries were personally
responsible for slavery in this country, and for all the wrongs that he
supposed had been the result of that institution. He felt it in every
fibre of his cultivated but narrow mind, and he went about elated at the
idea that he was able to contribute his mite of information to the
negroes, and breed in their minds hatred of the people among whom they
were compelled to live. If there had been a Booker Washington in that
day, he would have been denounced by the Hotchkisses as a traitor to his
race, and an enemy of the Government, just as they denounced and
despised such negroes as Uncle Plato.

Hotchkiss went along the road in high spirits. He had delivered a
blistering address to the negroes at the meeting of the league, and he
was feeling happy. His work, he thought, was succeeding. Before he
delivered his address, he had initiated Ike Varner, who was by all odds
the most notorious negro in all that region. Ike was a poet in his way;
if he had lived a few centuries earlier, he would have been called a
minstrel. He could stand up before a crowd of white men, and spin out
rhymes by the yard, embodying in this form of biography the weak points
of every citizen. Some of hi