"They obeyed the Constitution of the United States, and annulled the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the war of rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule into the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man's rights of person were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat's life, home, fireside and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man's way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech or boycotted him on account of his political faith."[10] This is the record which it is said "has worked lasting injury to the colored race." If the true history of this period proves anything it is this, namely, that the only republican government in fact as well as in form that has ever existed in the South was when the Negro, though a mere tyro in the art of government, was a controlling factor in southern politics. His "lasting injury" consists in the fact that he planted "the seeds of all the New South's prosperity." The Southern politicians, who in their desperation to perpetuate Negro Slavery created a national debt of more than three billions and stained every vale and hillside with the blood of freemen, point with ineffable horror at the extravagant financial legislation of the Reconstruction period. It may be that this much paraded extravagance amounts to more than the fiction of distorted facts; but, in view of the audacious corruption of the era which preceded it, and the gigantic peculations of that which has followed, the financial profligacy of Reconstruction may not have been so bad after all. Replying to a characteristic speech of Senator Tillman delivered in the recent South Carolina Constitutional Convention, in which he arraigned the financial legislation of Reconstruction in that State Mr. Thomas E. Miller, one of the six Negro members of the convention, said: