The "Force Bill" cracker is another very available "party lash" snap. Democratic campaign orators never fail to picture, in their denunciation of this hobgoblin, burly negroes guarding the polls with bayonets while timid white men come trembling forward to deposit their ballots. "Unless the Democratic ticket is elected, such a state of affairs will most certainly exist," shouts the office-holder, and there are, even now, voters in Alabama who are simple enough to believe it. No party advocates or indorses a measure of any such provisions, yet the people of the South are told that a vote against the Democratic party means the support of just such a state of affairs, and if possible, something worse. It is argued by Democrats, that under such a perilous probability, no farmer could justly consider his empty pocket, poverty-stricken home, overworked and shabbily-clothed family, and poorly-educated children, "and go off to discussing the money question." Until of recent years, the rank and file of the people in Alabama usually "kicked up the dust" in their terrible display of hostility to anything antagonistic to the Democratic party. In the meantime, the "machine bosses" wielded the "party lash" and popped the snap crackers over their heads; ingeniously playing upon their passions and prejudices, and always holding the offices. CHAPTER IV. THE TROUBLE OF THE SIXTIES. The people of Alabama were plunged into the bloody, surging sea of trouble in the sixties by the same extremist element in the South, which has more than once ruled more desperately than wisely, and is, in times of great emergency, scarcely conservative or sensible. The writer often imagines he can hear some of these same old blustering members of the ex-slave- and present office-holding hierarchy exciting the common people back before the sixties with their now "moss-covered" harangues, and wonders if some of the common herd could again be herded by these same herdsmen and be driven into another conflict of "a poor man's fight and a rich man's war." If it had not been for the rash domination of this "rule or ruin" element in the South at that time, there is no doubt but that "the war between the States" could have been averted, with far greater advantage to the people of this section. The masses of the people of Alabama were not at heart secessionists, but it is, as heretofore, unwritten truth that this state was seceded fraudulently by the original "machine bosses" who dictated the seating of the delegates in the "secession convention," and who ruthlessly sacrificed the lives and property of the poor in a vain endeavor to add to the coffers of the rich landlord by further enslaving humanity.