Slavery was a great wrong, and secession was an error and a terrible blunder, but Reconstruction was a punishment so far in excess of the crime that it extinguished every sense of culpability upon the part of those whom it was sought to convict and convert. More than a quarter of a century has now passed since the blunder-crime of Reconstruction played its baleful part in alienating the two sections of the country. Until four years ago little progress had been made in reconciling them. It is said now that the recent war with Spain, in which men from the North and men from the South marched under the same banner to battle and to victory, has buried the hatchet forever between them. But they had done this many times before, and yet it did not prevent the attempt to destroy the Union. It cannot be in this alone that the South feels increased security against the doctrines and the {298} policies and interferences of the Republican party with regard to the negro question, the great question which has made and kept the South solidly Democratic. It is something far more significant and substantial than this. It is to some the pleasing, though to others startling, fact, that the Republican party, in its work of imposing the sovereignty of the United States upon eight millions of Asiatics, has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man. It is this change of mind and heart on the part of the North in regard to this vital question of Southern "State" polity which has caused the now much-talked-of reconciliation. {299} CHAPTER XIV INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES BETWEEN 1867 AND 1877