he blacks were much more sinned against than
sinning. They were sinned against by their white leaders, who in the main
used them to advance their personal and party interest, and who employed
the positions they thus gained to steal the people's money, to enrich
themselves at the expense of the states. There were colored leaders who
followed closely in the footsteps of the white leaders in perverting
public trusts to corrupt ends, but the chief malefactors, the biggest
scoundrels were members of the white race. In these circumstances the
blacks were the helpless victims of the misrule of their own leaders and
of the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites. In their need they
asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and
wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions. They prayed
for peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there swept
over them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nights
and days, the season of their planting and the season of their reaping
with terror and destruction, and they just out of the house of bondage.
They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson in
obedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we have
seen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beating
down and destroying constituted authority. Nor did they get any training
in personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race.
For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into the
great and flourishing American art and industry of graft.

This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag
governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of
the Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can be
placed to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly be
set down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To the
carpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for the
first time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right of
each child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education at
the hands of the state. These are two vital things which the South needed
then and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed then
and which their successors oppose to-day. That is what the whites did to
educate the blacks during the most impressionable