One can easily understand why a Southern historian should say that the Southern States look back without bitterness on the years of the war, when brave men met brave men on the field of battle; but that they are furious when they remember the years which followed, when the victors, partly out of mistaken philanthropy, partly out of thoughtlessness and indifference, and partly out of evil intent, hastened to put the reins of government into the hands of a race which was hardly out of African barbarism; and thus utterly disheartened the men and women who had built up the splendid culture of the Old South. Perhaps there was no phase of American history, he says, so filled with poetry and romantic charm as the life of the South in the last ten years before the war; and certainly no period has been so full of mistakes, uncertainties, and crime as the decade immediately following. A reaction had to come, and it came in the twenty years between 1875 and 1895. The South betook itself to devious methods at the ballot-box. It was recognized that falsification of election returns was an evil, but it was thought to be a worse evil for the country to be handed over to the low domination of illiterate negroes. The political power of the negro has been broken in this way. Again and again the same method was resorted to, until finally the public opinion of the South approved of it, and those who juggled with the ballot-box were not pursued by the arm of the law, because the general opinion was with them. There has been another and more important fact. Slowly all party opposition between the whites vanished, and the race question became the sole political issue. To be sure, there have been free-traders and protectionists in the South, and representatives of all other party principles; but all genuine party life flagged and all less important distinctions vanished at the ballot-box when the whites rallied against the blacks, and since the negroes voted invariably with the Republican party, which had set them free, the entire white population of the South has become Democratic. By this political consolidation, the power of the negro has been further restricted. People have gradually become convinced, however, that political life stagnates when large states have only the one fixed idea, as if hypnotized by the race issue. The need has been felt anew of participating once more in all the great problems which interest the nation and which create the parties. The South looks back longingly on the time when it used to furnish the most brilliant statesmen of the nation. The South has become also aware that so soon as public opinion allows a systematic corruption of the ballot-box, then every kind of selfishness and corruption has an easy chance to creep in.