for the best; thought they were doing their duty. And, so, having made
the people free, and equal before the law, and given them the ballot
with which to settle their disputes, the "_wise men_" left the people
to live in peace if they could, and to cut each other's throats if
they could not. That they should have proceeded to cut each other's
throats was as natural as it is for day to follow night.

I do not desire to be understood as inveighing against the manumission
of the slave or the enfranchisement of the new-made free man. To do
so, would be most paradoxical on my part, who was born a slave and
spent the first nine years of my life in that most unnatural
condition. What I do inveigh against, is the unequal manner in which
the colored people were pitted against the white people; the placing
of these helpless people absolutely in the power of this hereditary
foeman--more absolutely in their power, at their mercy, than under the
merciless system of slavery, when sordid interest dictated a modicum
of humanity and care in treatment. And I arraign the "Reconstruction
policy" as one of the hollowest pieces of perfidy ever perpetrated
upon an innocent, helpless people; and in the treatment of the issues
growing out of that policy, I arraign the dominant party of the time
for base ingratitude, subterfuge and hypocrisy to its black partisan
allies. With the whole power of the government at its back, and with a
Constitution so amended as to extend the amplest protection to the
new-made citizen, it left him to the inhuman mercy of men whose
uncurbed passions, whose deeds of lawlessness and defiance, pale into
virtues the ferocity of Cossack warfare. And, for this treachery, for
leaving this people alone and single-handed, to fight an enemy born in
the lap of self-confidence, and rocked in the cradle of arrogance and
cruelty, the "party of great moral ideas" must go down to history amid
the hisses and the execrations of honest men in spite of its good