ordinary dealings) upright white people of the South excuse and defend this course of procedure; and, stranger still, very many honourable citizens of the North, Republicans as well as Democrats, do not hesitate to declare, "If I were a Southern white man I should act as the Southern white men do." The cardinal principle of the political creed of 99 per cent. of the Southern whites is that the white man must rule at all costs and at all hazards. In comparison with this principle every other article of political faith dwindles into ridiculous insignificance. White domination is a living question that dwarfs tariff reform, protection, free trade, and the very pales of party. The white who does not believe in it above all else is regarded as a traitor and an outcast. The race question is, in the South, the sole question of burning interest. If be sound on that question you are one of the elect; if you be unsound, you take rank as a pariah or as a lunatic.

you

After the War of Secession the North complacently folded its hands and announced that the race problem had been for ever disposed of. It soon learned that such had not been precisely the case. Then, after making an ill-advised and spasmodic effort at settlement, it declared that the race problem was no longer its affair, and that it might be left to solve itself. But since

then years have elapsed, and the question still remains unsettled, paralysing the South, menacing the whole Union, and liable at any moment to involve hundreds of thousands of miles of territory and millions of human lives in a catastrophe scarcely inferior to that of the great Civil War. Is it not time, then, for something to be done towards freeing the South from the incubus of the situation, and the North from the danger that lurks still along the line which, less than a generation ago, saw Federal and Confederate striving in vain to settle this very question?

It may be asked: Why cannot the South submit itself to the operation of those principles by which the North is governed? Why not allow the majority-no matter what may be its hue-to rule?

The answer is that the experiment has been to some extent tried, and has utterly failed. The history of the attempt and of the failure is given in the following chapter. The outlines of that history must be studied by every one who aspires to understand the nature and difficulties of the Southern problem as it exists to-day. I do not, therefore, apologise for setting forth at some length the gloomy narrative of one of the most extraordinary episodes in the modern history of any civilised country. If I needed further excuse,

I might find it in the fact that my story, though it deals with events of comparatively recent occurrence and of a very terrible character, is unknown to the majority of Englishmen. Even in the North it is now well-nigh forgotten; and only in the long-suffering South are the hideous lessons of it still fully remembered.

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CHAPTER II.

THE EX-SLAVE AS MASTER.

THE Civil War ended in 1865, and the Con- . federacy lay crushed and dead. With it died slavery in the United States. The Slavery Question was, of course, the fons et origo of the war, but it was by no means the sole, or even the ostensible, point at issue between North and South. Nor was anything beyond the mere manumission of the slave ever involved in the slavery question. The North did not fight that the manumitted slave might be placed on terms of perfect equality with the white man, or even that he might obtain the franchise. It fought, so far as slavery was concerned, for manumission, and for nothing else; and it gained its point. The point is expressed in the Amendment XIII. to the Constitution, which declares that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction."