The standard bearers of the devil himself, coming direct from the lowest depths of the infernal regions, with seething vials of wrath and an earnest intention to do the bidding of their master, could scarcely have set on foot a conspiracy more damnable than this. Men, women and children were to be included in the portending storm, religion and human decency were to be outraged, the law of the land and its administrators defied, and justice scoffed at in the pillory. The ordinary safe-guards to the social well being of the community were to be swept away whenever they became inimical to the designs and objects of the unholy alliance thus formed. Men were to be banded together and bound by oaths that ignored all others and made these supreme. Where the life or liberty of one of the brotherhood was in jeopardy, he was to be saved at all hazards. Perjury and subornation of perjury were to over-ride courts of justice and render abortive, any attempt to bring these lawless bands to punishment through their instrumentality. Nothing was to be too sacred for the vandal hands of these marauders who, under the guidance of the more intelligent leaders, were to go abroad like a consuming flame, until the land, that God had made pre-eminently beautiful for the abode of peace and contentment, had been smitten with a scourge of fire and blood, and their own wicked purposes had been accomplished. It seemed as if the voice of the Lord had again spoken through the prophet Ezekiel, "say to the forest of the South, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God: Behold I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree; the flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the South to the North shall be burned therein." It was to be a dual struggle. The colored races were to be subjugated or destroyed; and the humane efforts of the Government and the Administration to restore peace and harmony, and commercial prosperity, and to give to the citizens, of every creed and color, free and equal rights was everywhere to be opposed, that the experiment of reconstruction might become a hissing and a by-word, and go forth to the world an ignominious failure. The masses were kept in utter ignorance of these designs. They were in a state bordering upon absolute frenzy at the losses they had incurred from the fratricidal war that had left them bankrupt as individuals and communities, and with the peculiar anxiety that seems to pervade the hearts of all men, to endeavor to find some reasonable excuse for sins committed, they accepted the theories that had been so ingeniously prepared, and so carefully put before them, and became, like the clay in the hands of the potter, ready to be fashioned in any manner of form that might be decided upon by their wicked counselors.