[Sidenote: Criticism of the Reconstruction Acts.] But there is no question, now, that Congress did a monstrous thing, and committed a great political error, if not a sin, in the creation of this new electorate. It was a great wrong to civilization to put the white race of the South under the domination of the negro race. The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind. To put such a race of men in possession of a "State" government in a system of federal government is to trust them with the development of political and legal civilization upon the most important subjects of human life, and to do this in communities with a large white population is simply to establish barbarism in power over civilization. The supposed disloyalty, or even the actual disloyalty, of {134} the white population will not justify this. It will justify the indefinite withholding of the "State" form of local government. It will justify the throwing of a "State" of the Union back under the form of a Territory of the Union. It will even justify the establishment of martial law. But it is not to be cured, nor is the welfare of the whole land, or any part of it, to be promoted, by the subjection of the white race to the black race in politics and government. It was a great wrong to the negroes themselves. It made the white men among whom they must live their most bitter enemies, when they most needed them for friends, and it made the negroes trifling and corrupt politicians, when they should have been devoting themselves exclusively to the acquirement of property and education. It was argued, as will be well remembered, that they could not acquire property and education without the ballot. But this is another sophism. The mainstay of property is the courts; and under a Territorial form of local government Congress could have established a system of free schools. It was not at all necessary to have recourse to negro suffrage and negro "State" governments in order to secure the negroes in their personal liberty, and the possession of property, and to aid them in the acquirement of education.