But, in exposing the _wrongs_ of this people, we do not become their champion, nor even so much as pretend to assume that they possessed _rights_. If fanaticism, or, to use a stronger term, transcendentalism, morally speaking, or radicalism in politics, exists in the South (and we leave this problem to the _Science Monthly_), it has its fullest development on South Carolina soil. Her people have always shown themselves jealous of individual rights, and disposed to clannishness, where concessions affecting these have been made. They have attempted to secede from the Union on two occasions, and the latter of these became the political herald of the great civil war, whose incidents are remembered with tears by every patriot. The K. K. K. found her climate congenial, and from the first her people were mad against reconstruction; and while the writer may express no opinion on the subject, these things are spoken of to her disadvantage. But admitting that they were true, and that she occupies that revolutionary extreme in politics assigned her by the most reliable histories of the period, could that justify the course of her domestic enemies towards her, and should it chain the expression of the undissembling chronicler of such events? We need hardly state that this emetic proved too much for the K. K. K. animal, and that all its movements thereafter indicated not only a badly disordered stomach, but moral functions so much impaired that it was constantly ruled by a tendency to ask everybody pardon for sustaining this relation to society, and to accuse itself of crimes for which it could only assign somnambulistic causes. Indeed, about the year 1871, it was completely parodied out of the field, and if Ku-Klux horrors were far more frequent in this State after that period than previously, the reader, with the lights before him, is asked to assume the responsibility of the seeming paradox. It not only had no government patronage at its back, but, on the other hand, viewed a brilliant perspective of government halters, and seeing how unequal the rivalry must prove in more respects than one, wisely concluded to retire from business. A resolution of _sine die_ adjournment was actually passed, and the members having exchanged sad farewells and wept on each other's necks in view of the gloomy prospect before them, the "Shams," as they were derisively called, became masters of the situation. (If we except the Hamburg affair in the summer of 1876, and one other occurrence of merely local import, the white element of South Carolina has been guilty of no overt act since the period named implying contumacy towards the State government or the constitutional rights of the citizen.)