ant, and thoroughly vindictive and arrogant, it was during the second administration of General Grant. Yet it was Grant, with all his power and prestige, who, before he went out of office, was forced by the highest considerations of patriotic duty to withdraw the troops from the South, and confess the failure of the radical scheme of military reconstruction which Mr. Halstead proposes to set up again; for, if this be not his purpose, his writing is sheer rhodomontade, and I have too much respect both for his abilities and intentions to believe him capable of empty clatter and double-dealing, having no other object than current sensational effect.

As the readers of the FORUM cannot have failed to observe, Mr. Halstead lacks for no confidence in assertion. But he is still more confident in his statistics. He seems to be impressed by the conceit that "figures will not lie," all unconscious that no false witnesses are so efficacious and conscienceless when employed to make out a case for a packed jury. Let us see how, in his effort to fire the northern heart against the South, he employs them. For purposes of illustration, let me say, rather than of denial, shall I enter upon a brief analysis.

To begin with, Mr. Halstead takes five to one as the ratio of population to ballots, and in States thickly populated, with a population largely urban, this may do very well. It will not do in States largely agricultural, in which cities and towns are few. The habits of life are different, political excitement does not run so high, men do not so readily congregate and thus influence each other, and so a full vote is never polled. Moreover, "full votes" depend mainly on narrow margins between the opposing parties. When election contests are close, party managers resort to every means, legitimate and illegitimate, to bring out the party strength, while in States about whose position there is no doubt both parties are lethargic and indifferent.

Compare, for a moment, political affairs in Indiana with the course of politics in Kentucky; or compare Ohio and Kentucky. In Kentucky no one claims that the negro vote is suppressed. Aside from any moral question involved, there is no motive to suppress it. A negro or a Republican is as free to vote, or to refrain from voting, in Kentucky, as is a white man or a Democrat.

There is no excitement over a Kentucky contest, no doubt as to the result. In 1880, for example, Hancock was exceedingly popular in Kentucky, and our people were deeply anxious for his election; yet with a population, according to the census of 1880, of 1,648,690, the total vote cast in Kentucky was 268,047, when, according to Mr. Halstead's ratio, it should have been 329,738 a suppressed vote of 61,691. In Indiana in 1880 the population was 1,978,301; the vote for governor, which was larger than the total vote for President, was 470,738, though, according to Mr. Halstead's ratio, it should have been 395,650: an excess of 75,188. In 1880 Ohio's population was 3,198,062, and, according to Mr. Halstead, that State was entitled to 639,612 votes; it cast 722,325, or an excess of 82,713. Both Indiana and Ohio went Republican.

In the three States there is a wide divergence; but it is fairer and more reasonable to assume fraud, ballot-box stuffing, false returns, and wholesale corruption in order to account for the immense excess of voters north of the Ohio, than it is to account for the small vote in Kentucky by Mr. Halstead's theory of nullification. The point I make is, that the population of the southern States is widely scattered; it is chiefly rural. Naturally, after the downfall of the carpet-bag governments, and the imprisonment or the exile of their old leaders, the negroes took less interest in politics than did the same population at the North. Take, however, the whole population and the total popular vote in 1880. Population, 50,155,783. The vote, according to Mr. Halstead, should have been 10,031,156, but it was only 9,204,428, or 800,000 votes nullified. Or, taking the Ohio ratio, the total vote should have been 11,250,000, and thus over 2,000,000 votes were nullified.

Mr. Halstead, with a logic peculiarly his own, charges the Democrats with the responsibility for the fact that in many of the congressional districts in the South the Republicans made no nominations in 1886. According to his own tables there were no Republican nominations in three districts of Alabama, two of Arkansas, six of Georgia, one of Louisiana, four of Mississippi, four of Texas, and six of South Carolina. This demoralization followed the downfall of the carpet-bag governments. The Re

publicans who, in 1868, were the representatives of the party, had, because of their criminal actions, become fugitives from justice. They had pillaged the State treasuries by their control of the legislatures; they had fixed an illegal and insupportable debt on the States; they had robbed the negroes through the Freedman's Bank, and, through their agents, they had committed every imaginable crime against the ballot. When the dupes of these malefactors saw them deserted by Mr. Hayes and the Republicans of the North, when they saw many of them in the hands of the law, and others in hiding, waiting for the storm to blow over, it is not strange that no new leaders came forward to take the places of those whose careers of violence had closed in infamy.

As still further sustaining the position that, under any circumstances, the ratio of votes to the population is smaller in the South than in the North, let us compare the vote of 1872 for President with the vote estimated on Mr. Halstead's basis of one to five of population. The census of 1870 was confessedly inaccurate, and not less than 10 per cent. should be added on this account. Moreover, the election of 1872 occurred three years after the taking of the census of 1870, and at least 10 per cent. should be added to the estimated vote on this account. In other words, one-fifth should be added to the first column in the table below, if we wish fairly to estimate the suppressed vote; but to avoid confusion I adhere to the census:

This election, bear in mind, was held in the heyday of the Republican domination at the South. Most of the electoral machinery was in the hands of its members, the returning boards

existed to do its bidding, and yet in every State there is a suppressed vote of enormous proportions. Certainly, if figures count for anything, they show that not one conclusion based by Mr. Halstead on his statistics can be sustained when confronted by the above comparison.

But, as I said, my purpose in taking any note of Mr. Halstead's rule-of-three statesmanship and his patriotism by geometrical progression, was less for denial than for illustration. I should be entitled to no respect or credit if I pretended that there is either a fair poll or count of the vast overflow of black votes in States where there is a negro majority, or that, in the nature of things present, there can be. There was not when the ballot-box was guarded by federal bayonets. There is not now. There can be only when both races divide on other than race lines, and when, with the disappearance of old antagonisms, new issues, involving differences of opinion among the whites and the blacks alike, remove from each the dangers of bygone conflict.

From the beginning of the agitation over African slavery to the war of the Rebellion, we had an ever-revolving circle of sectional distrust, throwing off incessant flashes of crimination and recrimination, and culminating in one vast, final conflagration. Therein were consumed all the elements of real and rational controversy between the North and South. The struggle had been, indeed, an irrepressible conflict. But the extinction of the right of property in man terminated it, and the confirmation of the results of battle into the organic law by three amendments to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, defining the civil status of the people of the southern States, and investing the blacks with the ballot, exhausted the forms of law to compass in a free country the end designed. That end, so far as the authors of the measures in question were concerned, was the perpetuation of the power of the Republican Party by the erection of a black oligarchy at the South, to be directed and controlled by the chiefs of the party in the national capital.

The scheme was preposterous in its failure to recognize the simplest operation of human nature upon human affairs, and in its total lack of foresight. It could stand only upon force. It did stand only upon force. The whole fabric of society in the

southern States, life, liberty, and property, found itself subjected to a military despotism, resting upon a mass of semi-barbarous and newly emancipated slaves, and led by unprincipled adventurers. Long life to such a monster was out of the question. It became so oppressive and so odious that, as I have shown, General Grant, assured of its impracticability after a fair trial, declined longer to sustain it, and before he retired from the presidency, withdrew the national troops. It was a failure so conspicuous and so confessed that his immediate successor, Mr. Hayes, lent the full weight of his administration to its complete overthrow. During its existence rapine and murder had been the normal condition throughout the stricken country. State and county treasuries were robbed right and left; the public credit was mortgaged to satisfy the rapacity of the plundering birds of passage who had been put in places of command; the ignorant blacks, cajoled and infuriated, were set in unequal encounter with the outraged whites; the stronger race, driven back upon its lines of last resort, sought self-preservation at any and every cost; and in a reign of blood and terror, inevitable to an array of forces so unnatural and so dissonant from the spirit of free government, and designed to serve a purpose so wicked and impossible, there was safety nowhere for life or property, either of the blacks or the whites.

During this trial of the people of the South by fire no one stood for the repressive side of the machine with a confidence so undoubting and a credulity so unshaken and cheerful as Mr. Halstead. He drew all his pictures in black and white and with a brand of charcoal snatched from the burning. This had no beginning, no middle, and no end. Under the master's bold treatment, and on his capacious canvas, every disturbance south of Cincinnati grew into a revival of the rebellion; every fisticuff between a white man and a black man was elevated into a duel between treason and loyalty; every riot expanded into the dimensions of an insurrection; until all the year round it proved to be an exceeding cold day which did not furnish some blood-curdling story to frighten the children and inflame the Republicans of Ohio. And now, after ten years of comparative peace and order, this irreconcilable statesman and journalist, still