"The price of the policy to which it gave the final touch of permanence was the temporary disintegration of Southern society and the utter, apparently the irretrievable alienation of the South from the political party whose mastery it had been Mr. Stevens' chief aim to perpetuate. The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the Southern communities. The restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, prescribed by it, of whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance.... But there were men to whom counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were unpalatable, men who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them.... They took the law into their own hands and began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any course of public action." The agency by which the South was saved from the devilish scheme of Thaddeus Stevens to Africanize it and convert it into a mongrel, half-bred section was the original Ku Klux Klan! Brought into being by chance, and used as an agency to meet the exigency of the hour, it served its purpose as many similar systems have served theirs, including the Western vigilantes, whose work has been commended by Theodore Roosevelt on the ground of public necessity. Then having restored the South to the control of its better element, it passed away, to occupy a cherished place in the history of the Southern States, from which it can never be resurrected.