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CHAPTER IX.

THE TIME ELEMENT IN THIS PROBLEM.

O my purpose, not to discuss "dead issues"

here or elsewhere, I adhere. If history feels obliged to exhume the dead, let those do the work who find pleasure in it. But to know what the living issues are, to get fairly hold of the problems of to-day and of to-morrow-for our children's children will not see the end of it-it is needful to look back a little at events since the war.

Of all parties, especially of two, the Northern and the Southern whites, some things should be said in perfect good temper and fairness.

First of all, to go no further back, there has been, since April, 1865, a great folly and a great heat on both sides. The North has gone too fast, the South too slow. The conquerors have been impatient, after the manner of conquerors; the conquered have been sore under their yoke, and reluctant to "accept the situation," after the manner of conquered people. Sometimes, when it would have been wiser to have pulled up the steep hill the heavy loads put upon us, we have pulled rather against both "yoke and bows," hurting our galled

my cow runned away." He had our sympathies at once. The old doctor then proceeded to tell us why it was necessary for us to succeed in the struggle. He had known war and political convulsion in France. This was his peroration :

"Fellow-citizens, I have been in two revolutions before this. One time I was conquer-er, one time I was the conquer-ed. I tell you dere is one great deeferance in dose two leetle lettare."

No doubt the game old Frenchman was right; we know the "d," the North knows the "r." If they could put themselves on the other side, only in imagination, and only for a moment, (I have not the heart to ask it longer,) they would recall many words they have spoken, and undo some things that they have done. I am willing to apply the doctrine of repentance fairly; a philosopher on the "conquered" side should make allowance, considering the weakness of our nature, for even the pride and impatience of conquerors. Although not a philosopher, I am doing my best.

There are differences in the circumstances of the two parties, not merely in the issues of the struggle, but in their past relations to the matters in dispute. Slavery ceased in the Northern States (unless I should except the few hundred negroes who were held in bondage in the orderly and excellent State of Connecticut till 1840-poor, lonesome creatures that they were) before any of the present

generation were born. The people of the South had never known the negro except as a slave. When Northern slave-holders let go their grip on the negroes there were so few that their influence was inconsiderable. When Southern slaves were set free and made citizens, many thousands of white men being, for a time, disfranchised, they were strong enough in numbers and outside help to control things.

"the old flag" that made the millions of the North practically "solid" for abolitionism in 1861.

Forgetting these things in their own history, as well as overlooking the relations of the South to the subject, the mass of the Northern people have judged us hardly and harshly. They have often been censorious and impatient because the South, which had owned slaves from the beginning, and had just lost them after a bloody and disastrous war, was not "born in a day!". Forgetting their own history as to the evolution, through two or three generations, of their advanced views, they have been impatient that the South should, not only formally, by solemn constitutional enactments, accept the negro as a freeman and a voter, but heartily fall in love with the new system that, in every Southern State that had gone fully into the war, put the government in the hands of strangers and of the slaves of yesterday, disfranchised thousands of the former leaders and rulers of the people, and left them nothing to do with government except the burden of new and heavy taxation. All this was "a weariness to the flesh," but not so exasperating as were the demands of certain doctrinaires, more zealous than wise, who strenuously insisted that the South should accept the “advanced views" as well as the "new facts."

Some of the absurdest things in the world were talked by these zealots. For instance, in 1867, in a