With all this indubitable record staring us in the eyes, with the daily report of inconceivable outrage darkening the air, with wrong in every form let loose upon the long-suffering freedman, General Lee breaks the respectable silence of his parole to deny that “the Southern people are hostile to the negroes, and would oppress them, if in their power to do it.” The report, he asserts, is “entirely unfounded,”--that is the phrase,--“entirely unfounded”; and then he dwells on the old patriarchal relation, with the habit from childhood of “looking upon them with kindness” (witness the history of Slavery in its authentic instances!); and then he insists that “the change in the relations of the two races has wrought no change in feelings towards them,” that “without their labor the land of the South would be comparatively unproductive, and therefore _self-interest would prompt the whites of the South to extend to the negroes care and protection_.” Here is the threadbare pretension with which we were so familiar through all the dreary days of the old Barbarism, now brought forward by the Generalissimo of the Rebellion to vindicate the new,--and all this with an unabashed effrontery, which shows, that, in surrendering his sword, he did not surrender that insensibility to justice and humanity which is the distinctive character of the slave-master. The freedman does not need the “care and protection” of any such person. He needs the rights of an American citizen; and you are to declare by your votes if he shall have them. * * * * * The opposition to the Reconstruction Acts manifests itself in an inconceivable brutality, kindred to that of Slavery, and fit prelude to the revival of this odious wrong. Shall this continue? Outrage in every form is directed against loyal persons, without distinction of color. It is enough that a man is a patriot for Rebels to make war upon him. Insulted, abused, and despoiled of everything, he is murdered on the highway, on the railway, or, it may be, in his own house. Nowhere is he safe. The terrible atrocity of these acts is aggravated by the rallying cries of the murderers. If the victim is black, then it is a “war of races”; if white, then he is nothing but a “carpet-bagger”; and so, whether black or white, he is a victim. History has few scenes of equal guilt. Persecution in all its untold cruelties, ending in martyrdom, rages over a wide-spread land.