known as the "Reconstruction policy." This _policy_, born out of
expediency and nurtured in selfishness, was, in its inception,
instinct with the elements of failure and of death. Perhaps no piece
of legislation, no policy, was ever more fatuous in every detail. How
could it be otherwise? How could the men who devised it expect for it
anything more than a speedy, ignominous collapse? All the past history
of the Southern states unmistakably pointed to the utter failure of
any policy in which the whites were not made the masters; unless,
indeed, they were subjected to that severe governmental control which
their treason merited, until such time as the people were prepared for
self-government by education, the oblivion of issues out of which the
war grew, the passing away by death of the old spirits, and the
complete metamorphosis of the peculiar conditions predicated upon and
fostered by the unnatural state of slavery.

At the close of the Rebellion, in 1865, the United States government
completely transformed the social fabric of the Southern state
governments; and, without resorting to the slow process of educating
the people; without even preparing them by proper warnings; without
taking into consideration the peculiar relations of the subject and
dominant classes--the slave class and the master class--instantly, as
it were, the lamb and the lion were commanded to lie down together.
The master class, fresh from the fields of a bloody war, with his
musket strapped to his shoulder and the sharp thorn of ignominious
defeat penetrating his breast; the master class, educated for two
hundred years to dominate in his home, in the councils of municipal,
state and Federal government; the master class, who had been taught
that slavery was a divine institution and that the black man, the
unfortunate progeny of Ham, was his lawful slave and property; and
the slave class, born to a state of slavery and obedience, educated in