st adapted to these elements. If a
county, State, or general election were to be held, these men, getting
themselves up in approved Ku-Klux toilet, went forth to lay their knives
at the throats of a sufficient number of innocents to afford a text for
bloody-shirt invectives, and straightway the political sky rained soldiers
enough to garrison the polls of a small empire. Murder, arson, rape,
robbery, etc., all had a place in their vocabulary, not indeed as we would
speak of them in the abstract, but with all those horrible belongings of
sentimentality which attach to each when enterprised wilfully, cheerfully,
and with scarcely a selfish end in view. Warring against women and
children was a foible of the society, which they carried to such a state
of development that it became first an _attribute_, and then a furious
_passion_; insomuch that, if a faithful history of their exploits were
written, the noble patriots of Maine and Massachusetts would execrate
them, as they do not, could not, those secret enemies who war against
social virtue in their midst, and the book could have no other title than
"Murderers of the Innocents."

But, in exposing the _wrongs_ of this people, we do not become their
champion, nor even so much as pretend to assume that they possessed
_rights_. If fanaticism, or, to use a stronger term, transcendentalism,
morally speaking, or radicalism in politics, exists in the South (and we
leave this problem to the _Science Monthly_), it has its fullest
development on South Carolina soil. Her people have always shown
themselves jealous of individual rights, and disposed to clannishness,
where concessions affecting these have been made. They have attempted to
secede from the Union on two occasions, and the latter of these became the
political herald of the great civil war, whose incidents are remembered
with tears by every patriot. The K. K. K. found her climate congenial, and
from the first her people were mad against reconstruction; and while the
writer may express no opinion on the subject, these things are spoken of
to her disadvantage. But admitting that they were true, and that she
occupies that revolutionary extreme in politics assigned her by the most
reliable histories of the period, could that justify the course of her
domestic enemies towards her, and should it chain the expression of the
undissembling chronicler of such events?

We need hardly state that this emetic proved too much for the K. K.