The writings of Rhodes and Dunning contain the best comprehensive accounts of political reconstruction. For greater detail, the series of doctoral dissertations on reconstruction in the several States, directed by Professor Dunning and printed generally in the Columbia University Studies, has great value. In W.L. Fleming, _Documentary History of Reconstruction_ (2 vols., 1906), important selections from the sources have been printed; the same writer's _Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama_ (1905) is the best account of the process in a single State. J.A. Woodburn, _Thaddeus Stevens_, is useful. The old and new economic systems of the South receive their keenest interpretation in the works of U.B. Phillips and A.H. Stone. The _Annual Cyclopaedia_ continues valuable; the Report of the Ku-Klux Committee is invaluable (42d Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report, No. 41, 13 vols.). _Harper's Weekly_, which supported Grant in 1872, was the most prominent journal of the period. C.F. Adams, Jr., has contributed to the diplomatic history of these years his _Charles Francis Adams_ (1900, in American Statesmen Series), and his "Treaty of Washington" (in _Lee and Appomattox_, 1902). Elaborate details of the arbitrations are in J.B. Moore, _History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to which the United States has been a Party_ (6 vols., 1898). An interesting series of recollections of reconstruction events, by Watterson, Reid, Edmunds, and others, was printed in the _Century Magazine_ during 1913. CHAPTER IV THE PANIC OF 1873 "Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he considered the relations of business and politics. He answered himself in the affirmative and found comrades in his pessimism throughout that intellectual class in whose achievements America has taken conscious pride. For at least ten years they despaired of the return of honesty. James Russell Lowell, decorated with the D.C.L. of Oxford, and honored everywhere in the world of letters, was filled with doubt and dismay as late as 1876, at "the degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not," he asked, "a result of democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or ... for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"