CHAPTER VIII.
_The Nation Surrenders_ The mind sickens in contemplating the mistakes of the "Reconstruction policy;" and the revolting peculation and crime--which went hand in hand from 1867-8 to 1876, bankrupting and terrorizing those unfortunate States--plunging them into all but anarchy, pure and simple.
A parallel to the terror which walked abroad in the South from 1866, down to 1876, and which is largely dominant in that section even unto the present hour, must be sought for in other lands than our own, where the iron hand of the tyrant, seated upon a throne, cemented with a thousand years of usurpation and the blood of millions of innocent victims, presses hard upon the necks of the high and the backs of the low; we must turn to the dynastic villanies of the house of Orleans or of Stuart, or that prototype of all that is tyrannical, sordid and inhuman, the Czar of all the Russias.

The "Invisible Empire," with its "Knights of the White Camelia," was as terrible as the "Empire" which Marat, Danton and Robespierre made for themselves, with this difference: the "Knights of the White Camelia" were assassins and marauders who murdered and terrorized in defiance of all laws, human or divine, though claiming allegiance to both; while the Frenchmen regarded themselves as the lawful authority of the land and rejected utterly the Divine or "higher law." The one murdered men as highwaymen do, while the other murdered them under the cover of law and in the name of _Liberty_, in whose name, as Madame Roland exclaimed on the scaffold of revolutionary vengeance, so many crimes are perpetrated! The one murdered kings and aristocrats to unshackle the limbs of the proletariat of France; the other murdered the proletariat of the South to re-rivet their chains upon the wretched survivors.

And each class of murders proclaimed that it was actuated by the motive of _justice and humanity_.

Liberty was the grand inspiration that steeled the arm and hardened the heart of each of the avengers! And thus it has been in all the history of murder and plunder.
Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and sacred to the race.

The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell, were they not drawn in the name of Liberty--the People?
The guillotine of the French Commune and the derringer of J.Wilkes Booth, were they not inspired by Liberty--the People?
The innocent blood which has been spilt in the name of liberty and the people, which has served the purposes of tyranny and riveted upon the people most galling chains, "would float a navy." By the side of the robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and unnecessary taxation upon the people of that state by the Carpet-Bag harpies, aided and abetted by the ignorant negroes whom our government had not given time to shake the dust of the cornfield from their feet before it invited them to seats in the chambers of legislature, we must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburgh and Ellenton.
By the side of the misgovernment, the honeycomb of corruption in which the Carpet-Bag government of Louisiana reveled, we must place the universal lawlessness which that state witnessed from 1867 to 1876.
The whole gamut of states could be run with the same deplorable, the same sickening conclusion.
The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to watch the fire-brand.