d himself in the public view,
for to Jerry, as to the white people themselves, the white people were
the public. He had won the goodwill of the best people, and had already
begun to reap a tangible reward. It is true that several strange white
men looked at him with lowering brows as he crossed the street, which
was curiously empty of colored people; but he nevertheless went firmly
forward, panoplied in the consciousness of his own rectitude, and
serenely confident of the protection of the major and the major's
friends.

"Jerry is about the only negro I have seen since nine o'clock," observed
the general when the porter had gone. "If this were election day, where
would the negro vote be?"

"In hiding, where most of the negro population is to-day," answered
McBane. "It's a pity, if old Mrs. Ochiltree had to go this way, that it
couldn't have been deferred a month or six weeks." Carteret frowned
at this remark, which, coming from McBane, seemed lacking in human
feeling, as well as in respect to his wife's dead relative.

"But," resumed the general, "if this negro is lynched, as he well
deserves to be, it will not be without its effect. We still have in
reserve for the election a weapon which this affair will only render
more effective. What became of the piece in the negro paper?"

"I have it here," answered Carteret. "I was just about to use it as the
text for an editorial."

"Save it awhile longer," responded the general. "This crime itself will
give you text enough for a four-volume work."

When this conference ended, Carteret immediately put into press an extra
edition of the Morning Chronicle, which was soon upon the streets,
giving details of the crime, which was characterized as an atrocious
assault upon a defenseless old lady, whose age and sex would have
protected her from harm at the hands of any one but a brute in the
lowest human form. This event, the Chronicle suggested, had only
confirmed the opinion, which had been of late growing upon the white
people, that drastic efforts were necessary to protect the white women
of the South against brutal, lascivious, and murderous assaults at the
hands of negro men. It was only another significant example of the
results which might have been foreseen from the application of a false
and pernicious political theory, by which ignorance, clothed in a little
brief authority, was sought to be exalted over knowledge, vice over
virtue, an inferior and degraded race abov