Yes, sir, we repeat, or in virtual connivance therewith. And, when you made your Southern tour a little later, and we saw how cunningly you catered to Southern race prejudice and proscription; how you, the one single public man and magistrate of the country, who, by virtue of your exalted office, ought under no circumstances to recognize caste distinctions and discriminations among your fellow-citizens, received white men at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., and black men afterward in a negro church; how you preached patience, industry moderation to your long-suffering black fellow-citizens, and patriotism, jingoism and imperialism to your white ones; when we saw all these things, scales of illusion in respect to your object fell from our eyes. We felt that the President of the United States, in order to win the support of the South to his policy of “criminal aggression” in the far East, was ready and willing to shut his eyes, ears and lips to the “criminal aggression” of that section against the Constitution and the laws of the land, wherein they guarantee civil rights and citizenship to the negro, whose ultimate reduction to a condition of fixed and abject serfdom is the plain purpose of the Southern people and their laws. When, several months subsequently, you returned to Georgia, the mob spirit, as if to evince its supreme contempt for your presence and the federal executive authority which you represent, boldly broke into a prison shed, where were confined helpless negro prisoners on a charge of incendiarism, and brutally murdered five of them. These men were American citizens, entitled to the rights of American citizens, protection and trial by due process of law. They were, in the eye of the law, innocent until convicted by a jury of their peers. Had they been in legal custody in Russia or Spain or Turkey they had not been slaughtered by a mob under like circumstances; for the Russian military power, or the Spanish or the Turkish, would have guarded those men in their helpless and defenseless condition from the fury of the populace who were seeking their blood. Sir, they were men; they were your brothers; they were God’s children, for whom Jesus lived and died. They ought to have been sacred charges in the hands of any civilized or semi-civilized State and people. But almost in your hearing, before your eyes (and you the chief magistrate of a country loudly boastful of its freedom, Christianity and civilization), they were atrociously murdered. Did you speak? did you open your lips to express horror of the awful crime and stern condemnation of the incredible villainy and complicity of the constituted authorities of Georgia in the commission of this monstrous outrage, which out-barbarized barbarism and stained