the payment of teachers in the public schools. The petitioners claim
that this should be reduced to $25 a month for second-class schools, and
$50 a month for first-class schools. In fact, when the Democrats came
into power, they reduced the rate to $40 a month,--which, for a school
year of four months only, seems like penny-wise economy. The petition
makes perhaps the strongest impression in its statement that the boards
of supervisors, controlling local taxation, are, as a general rule,
"wholly unfit to discharge their duties, and without respectability or
even accountability"; that the public works under their care are
recklessly and carelessly managed, and the county taxes are grievous. It
would seem that in these local bodies, especially in the "black
counties," lay the worst of the taxpayers' grievance.

Judge Story makes a vigorous retort, testifying after a year of
Democratic administration, 1875-6, as to the question of comparative
expense. He shows that the State tax had indeed been reduced from 9-1/4
mills to 6-1/2 mills, but this only by cutting off outright the school
tax of two mills. Not to follow further the labyrinth of figures, it is
interesting to note, as to the favorite term "carpet-bagger," that of
the six Republican candidates for Congress in Mississippi, in 1876, only
one was of Northern birth, and he had married and lived in the South
since the war; one had been an old Southern Democrat and a circuit
judge; two had been Confederate officers; and one, John R. Lynch, was a
colored man of high intelligence and excellent character. He, as Speaker
of the House, and B. K. Bruce, United States Senator, were among the
colored men who showed capacity and character worthy of the high
positions they attained. Among the Republican leaders of Northern birth
were some who were honored and trusted in their old homes; such men as
General Eggleston, president of the Constitutional convention; Colonel
Warner, afterward State Treasurer of Connecticut, and Henry W. Warren,
of Massachusetts. The first Republican governor, J. M. Alcorn, was a
Southern man, very able, but apparently not of the highest moral
standards. His successor, Adelbert Ames, was from Massachusetts,
conceded now to have been "honest and brave, but narrow and
puritanical," and with the mysterious trait of "hating the Aryan race of
the South."

These last words are quoted from the story of an old friend of the
reader's,--Thomas Dabney, the "South