ocal
self-government, and so far was the possibility of self-government
removed that it was left uncertain whether or not the black Kaffir
population would not be used to control them and outvote them if a sham
of self-government were set up.

Now let us suppose Grant offering similar terms to Lee. Let us suppose
him saying that the eleven states of the confederacy would be held as
crown colonies, or presidential subject colonies for an indefinite
period, and that the north reserved the right to control the south by
means of giving the vote to the recently freed black slaves and
withholding it from the whites. Do we not all know what Lee's answer and
what the answer of the whole south would have been to those terms?

We all know what happened a few years afterwards in the reconstruction
period when the blacks were to a certain extent put over the whites. We
all know that the south immediately turned to guerilla methods or as
they were called the Ku Klux societies, societies of secret
assassination and terror, methods far worse than ordinary guerillaism.
Moreover these Ku Klux methods were successful. They broke the dominion
of the black man. They compelled the north to stop, to recall its carpet
baggers, to reconsider its injustice; or as Mr. Page puts it the
southerners reconquered their own country, and had it again under their
own normal state governments. But if Lee and the other southern leaders
had known all this was coming they would have begun the guerillaism at
Appomatox.

The Ku Klux methods were unpleasant, atrocious, unfortunate in many
ways; for as most of us can remember, they fixed upon southern life the
habit of assassination, which continued for many years in a manner most
revolting and shocking to northern moral sense and it has only recently
begun to die out. But who was to blame? England has in the same way
turned the Irish into assassins, rioters and law breakers, and then
cries out that they are barbarous and uncivilized and must be "coerced"
and forced into more assassination, rioting and law breaking. I place
the blame where it belongs; and I venture to predict that if England
continues her inhuman, morally degrading and worse than Irish policy
with the Boers she will turn them into a race of assassins or law
breakers. They are now the very reverse of that. They have shown a
higher regard for the sacredness of human life than we have to-day in
America. They have shown more self-restraint, more