exterior, and incapable of redemption. He is represented as probably having no soul — precisely as the negroes. If he is intended, as would seem, as the author's representation of Marion Butler, the talented Populist leader of the South, his character and fate would seem to require modification.
The stress of the story, however, is not on these Northern adventurers or the Southern scalawags ; they are but the setting for the negro character, which is conceived as antipathetic to the white. The negro is here defined as anyone having one drop of negro blood, and the less that intermixture, the weaker and worse the character. But four such characters are individualized. These are Nelse, the faithful slave who served his master tp the latter's death, and then his mistress until his own death from wounds by the Freedmen ruffians ; Dick, the new uneducated ne- gro ; Tim Shelby, the tool of the carpet- baggers, and George Harris, the mod- em educated negro. To each of these three modern negroes is assigned one overwhelming passion — that of pos- sessing a white woman. Tim Shelby, who had become affluent through his plunders at the capital, and had the means to gratify every passion, reveal- ed this final extravagance of nature by attempting to secure — at the price of position as school teacher, which was in his power to give — a kiss from the daughter of the village doctor. With this arose the Ku Klux, and Shelby was hanged.
Dick, the new plantation negro and vagabond, became the fiend who de- stroyed the life of the last remaining child of Tom Camp, the crippled Con- federate veteran; and also, by that crime, the reason of the old soldier. This description, sorrowful as it is, is the best done of any part of the book. It is sufficiently restrained to meet the requirements of literary excellence ; it is also an account of a calamity so great that anyone with a man's feel- ings is compelled to have sympathy and respect. The execution that fol- lowed, that of burning the negro, seems, on the showing, to be inevitable, if not justifiable. One is inclined to
say that for such brutes no torture is too great. Such a subject can hardly be discussed here, and we cannot but allow that the wrath of a community is an elemental uprising for protection, not unlike that of a herd of cattle that combines to form a circle around their young, and to meet the beast of prey with a wall of horns. Nevertheless, as an argument against the negro, or ne- groid, it is manifestly discredited by facts elsewhere. Similar crimes, and just as atrocious, are committed by whites. Oregon was horrified a few years ago by such a crime, with mur- der, in Clackamas county ; and Califor- nia by a double murder of the same kind in the heart of San Francisco. The theory that the negro, or negroid, is a brute without a soul, who can be only restrained by terror, must also be ex- tended to include the white fiend, or the fiend of any other race. With the disappearance bf the negro or negroid, this character of crime would not cease. It cannot appear as otherwise than a species of race hatred that would burn a colored fiend but leave the equally guilty and loathsome white fiend to legal trial.
In the third character, George Har- ris, who is the little son of Eliza, who crossed the Ohio on the ice, now grown and educated by Miss Walker, and em- ployed by Lowell of Boston, the sup- posed negro infatuation is carried al- most to absurdity. Harris asks his pa- tron's permission to gain the affections of his daughter, but is indignantly re- fused and ordered out of the house — though but an octoroon. He is heart- broken, and contemplates suicide, but has not the courage, and after looking in vain for work, at last makes five hundred dollars in a gambling joint, and with this visits the ash-piles of negroes burned in Ohio, Kansas and Colorado — Northern states. The argu- ment here intended is that the antipa- thy to the negro is racial, not sectional ; and the conclusion, that the South is comparatively justifiable in such pun- ishments. It seems almost a peculiarity of the Southern mind that all these questions are judged by comparison with the North. But what if^e North
