These corrupt governments had glamours. Officials had money to burn. New Orleans was like another Monte Carlo for one while. Gambling parlours stood open to women and minors. Then was its twenty-five-year charter granted the Louisiana State Lottery. At a garden party in Washington not long ago, a Justice of the Supreme Court said in response to some question I put: "It would take the pen of a Zola to describe reconstruction in Louisiana! It is so dark a chapter in our national history, I do not like to think of it." A Zola might base a great novel on that life and death struggle between politicians and races in the land of cotton and sugar plantations, the swamps and bayous and the mighty Mississippi, where the Carpet-Bag Governments had a standing army, of blacks chiefly, with cavalry, infantry, artillery, and navy of warships going up and down waterways; where prominent citizens were arrested on blank warrants, carried long distances, held for months; where women and children listened for the tramp, tramp, of black soldiers on piazzas, the crash of a musket on the door, the demand for the master or son of the house! Dixie after the war is a mine for the romancer, historian, ethnologist. Never before in any age or place did such conditions exist. The sudden investiture of the uncivilised slave with full-fledged citizenship wrought tragedy and comedy not ready to Homer's, Shakespeare's or Cervantes's pen. The strange and curious race-madness of the American Republic will be a study for centuries to come. That madness took a child-race out of a warm cradle, threw it into the ocean of politics--the stormiest and most treacherous we have known--and bade it swim for its own life and the life of the nation! CRIME AGAINST WOMANHOOD CHAPTER XXXI CRIME AGAINST WOMANHOOD The rapist is a product of the reconstruction period. In the beginning he commanded observation North less by reason of what he did than by reason of what was done unto him. His chrysalis was a uniform; as a soldier he could force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white women; he was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came into life in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of social equality theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.