“And now, in looking back and criticising the errors of that time, it is like the talk of those who are watching a storm at sea, when, in order to save the ship, wrong ropes may be seized, and life-boats cast out into the stormy waves may be swept down and lost. But if the ship is saved, let the survivors of the crew forever bless and praise the brave hands and hearts that dared the storm and the peril. “But when the sky is clearer you can see more plainly than when the tempest is whirling about you and death and ruin are riding on the gale. “You can see plainer and you can see farther. “Now, it was a great and charitable idea, looking at it from one side, to let those who had tried their best to ruin the Union at once take an equal place with those who had perilled life and property to save it—to give them _at once_ the same rights in making the laws they had set at defiance. “It was a generous and charitable idea, looking on it from one side, but from another side it looked risky, very risky, and it looked dangerous to the further peace and perpetuity of that Union. “A little delay might not have done any harm—a little delay in giving them the full rights of citizenship. “And it might, Heaven knows, have been as well if the slaves had had a gradual bringing up of mind and character to meet the needs of legal responsibility, if they had not been _at once_ invested with all the rights and responsibilities which well-trained Christian scholars find it so difficult to assume, if they had not been required to solve by the ballot deep questions of statesmanship, the names of which they could not spell out in the newspaper. “Could such ignorance make them otherwise than a dangerous element in politics, dangerous to themselves and dangerous to the welfare of the Union? “Tossed back and forth as they were between two conflicting parties, in their helplessness and ignorance becoming the prey of the strongest faction, compelled, at the point of the sword and the muzzle of the revolver, to vote as the white man made them—the law of Might victorious over the Right—it was a terrible thing for the victim, and a still worse one for the victor. “What could happen in such a state of affairs only trouble and misery, evasions and perversions of the law, uprisings of the oppressed, secret bands of armed men intent on deeds of violence, whose only motives were to set at naught the law, to fight secretly against the power they had been openly forced to yield to. “What could happen save warfare, bloodshed, burning discontent, and secret nursing of wrongs amongst the blacks; hatred towards the Union amongst the whites, towards the successful foe who had humiliated them so beyond endurance by this last blow of forcing them into a position of equality towards their former slaves, and rousing up in them a more bitter animosity towards the poor blacks who had been the innocent cause of their humiliation.” “Wall, what could have been done?” sez Josiah.