every ten white men in South Carolina had
almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had. Men
talk of plans of reconstruction;--that is the best plan which proposes
to do most for the common people. Till civilization has been carried
down into the homes and hearts of all classes, we shall have neither
regard for humanity nor respect for the rights of the citizen. In many
sections of all these States human life is quite as cheap as animal
life. What a mental and moral condition does this indicate! Any plan of
reconstruction is wrong that does not assure toleration of opinion, and
the elevation of the common people to the consciousness that ours is a
republican form of government. Whether they are technically in the Union
or out of the Union, it is the national duty to deal with these States
in such manner as will most surely exalt the lower and middle classes of
their inhabitants. The nation must teach them a knowledge of their own
rights, while it also teaches them respect for its rights and the rights
of man as man.

Stopping for two or three days in some back county, I was always seeming
to have drifted away from the world which held Illinois and Ohio and
Massachusetts. The difficulty in keeping connection with our
civilization did not so much lie in the fact that the whole structure of
daily life is unlike ours, nor in the other fact that I was forced to
hear the Union and all loyal men reviled, as in the greater fact that
the people are utterly without knowledge. There is everywhere a lack of
intellectual activity. Schools, books, newspapers,--why, one may almost
say there are none outside the cities and towns. The situation is
horrible enough, when the full force of this fact is comprehended; yet
there is a still lower deep,--there is small desire, even feeble
longing, for schools and books and newspapers. The chief end of man
seems to have been "to own a nigger." In the important town of
Charlotte, North Carolina, I found a white man who owned the comfortable
house in which he lived, who had a wife and three half-grown children,
and yet had never taken a newspaper in his life. He thought they were
handy for wrapping purposes, but he couldn't see why anybody wanted to
bother with the reading of them. He knew some folks spent money for
them, but he also knew a-many houses where none had ever been seen. In
that State I found several persons--whites, and not of the "clay-eater"
class, either--who n