The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from a full knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments of Great Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of the South until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but their name, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustrious actions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislature would have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, where ignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to lay plans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country. At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery of electioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnation of all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a most diverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms, conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there was no check to the license of debate, or the prodigal expenditure of money; no voice to control their judgments of outlawry and sequestration. Radamanthus himself, in some stage of his infernal process, would at least listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, and lastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could not conceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not to allow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; but reconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-suffering people of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face of the concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations, all founded upon the "baseless fabric of a vision." Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands in Kansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger and scalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorous presence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disported with a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil gendering fanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whose destiny and happiness were closely interwoven with their old masters; with masters who had yielded their swords but not their honor; who were "discouraged, yet erect; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, under the seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, and languishing, did die.