whom he refers will achieve their aim, and be crowned
with the same reflected glory that has availed to cover a multitude of
sins in the instance of the American order, though reflecting people, who
take into account the incentives to such measures, can but regard them as
intermeddlers of a very base stamp. The cause of religious liberty on the
Turkish frontier will not be benefited by this revelation; and, continuing
the analogy, there are few men of influence in the Southern States who do
not make it a point, whenever occasion offers, to disclaim the alleged
good offices of the Klan in the work of Southern redemption.

We have before intimated that, in one of these States, the cause of the
allied Democrats and Republicans did receive essential aid from this
source, and while we shall not enter into any such exegesis of the
question as would show just how far the common cause was aided or retarded
by the secret measure, we must be permitted to record a belief that its
influence was commonly hurtful.

Every secret society, enterprised with a political end in view, must, in
the nature of the case, prove unpopular with the masses of those who wield
the franchise, and in not unfrequent instances, as we have anticipated,
be deprehended by the very individuals, or parties of individuals, whom
they seek to succor. In the instance of the Klan, these conditions were
felt with peculiar weight; inasmuch as the people among whom it was
domiciled cherished, beside this common feeling, a natural aversion to
such influences in politics, derived from their _ante bellum_ experience;
and the people of the North, unacquainted with its aims, and grossly
unenlightened as to its _materiel_ and claims to social rank, wrote it
down a very monster of sedition. It was denounced in public, scoffed at in
private, declared to be an outlaw by the legislatures, interpreted as the
very essence of crookedness in morals by the courts, fulminated against by
the national and State executives, and how, under these severe conditions,
it contrived to even exist, is, and must remain, one of the unsolved
problems of the "gilded age."

But, aside from any inherited odium of the quality which we have been
discussing, the Klan had obliquities of its own, and a record compiled
therefrom which could not fail to photograph it to the world in a very
disagreeable light, and obtain for it enemies (and sometimes potential
enemies), where it would not otherwise have p