political slang, as "waving the bloody shirt." It showed itself after
the war in unwillingness to release the South from military rule; then
in unwillingness to remove the disfranchisement of the whites or to
withdraw from the carpet-bag State governments the military support
without which they could not have existed for a day; and, last of all,
in dread of the advent of a Democratic Federal Administration in which
Southerners or "ex-rebels" would be likely to hold office. At first the
whole Republican party was more or less permeated by these ideas; but
the number of those who held them gradually diminished, until in 1884 it
was at last possible to elect a Democratic President. Nevertheless a
great multitude witnessed the entrance into the White House of a
President who is indebted for his election mainly to the States formerly
in rebellion, with genuine alarm. They feared from it something
dreadful, in the shape either of a violation of the rights of the
freedmen, or of an assault on the credit and stability of the Federal
Government. Nothing but actual experiment would have disabused them.

I am very familiar with the controversy with them, for I have taken some
part in it ever since the passage of the reconstruction Acts, and I know
very well how they felt, and am sometimes greatly impressed by the
similarity between their arguments and those of the opponents of Irish
Home Rule. One of their fixed beliefs for many years, though it is now
extinct, was that Southerners were so bent on rebelling again, and were
generally so prone to rebellion, that the awful consequences of their
last attempt in the loss of life and property, had made absolutely no
impression on them. The Southerner was, in fact, in their eyes, what Mr.
Gladstone says the Irishman is in the eyes of some Englishmen: "A _lusus
naturæ_; that justice, common sense, moderation, national prosperity had
no meaning for him; that all he could appreciate was strife and
perpetual dissension. It was for many years useless to point out to them