The editorial was severe, but dignified and fairly respectful. Rutledge commended Secretary Baxter for his prompt and emphatic refusal to lunch with a negro even though at the table of a President of the United States and at the President’s personal invitation or "command." He said the fact that Mr. Phillips had intended no insult made the insult no less real; and that Baxter had done the only possible thing—the duel being no longer in vogue—declined and resigned. He went on to say that there was an irreconcilable difference between the Northern and the Southern ideas of the social equality of the races; that the Southern man’s idea was bred in the bone, and no amount of argument or abuse or lofty advice from the Northern press, or boyish impulsiveness in the President’s chair, could change that idea one iota; that while their fears sometimes might be lulled to sleep, might be forgotten like other ills in the interest or excitement of other concerns, the black peril was their great Terror in both their waking and sleeping hours, and even when asleep they slept upon their arms. Elise read that in face of this Terror all other questions were insignificant, and all arguments, prejudices, passions, _loves and hates_ (she put her fingertip on the words) among Southern gentlemen melted away or were fused into a mighty and unalterable sentiment to go down to death rather than to permit social intermingling with the negro race. The editorial concluded that the Southern feeling on this subject was ineradicable, and was so deep-seated and universal that it became a great Fact which any man of fair discretion and sensible purpose would have recognized and reckoned with; that no President with an abiding sense of the proprieties would have proposed the luncheon to Baxter, and no gentleman of the South would have hesitated for a moment in declining the insulting invitation. The subject was dismissed with the prediction that the cause of the negro immediate and remote would be damaged immeasurably by this act of the impulsive gentleman in the White House who would take the Southern situation by the seat of the trousers as though it were a self-willed small boy pouting in a cellar and yank it incontinently up the Phillips stairs of progress. There was no other subject discussed in hotel lobbies, committee-rooms or wherever else two or more men were gathered together on the day after the facts were known. In the afternoon in one of the committee-rooms of the Senate, Senators Ruffin and Killam, Representatives Smith and Calhoun of Killam’s State, and Representative Hazard of a New York City district, were ventilating their views on the matter when Rutledge joined them, on the hunt for Calhoun.