The governor made extraordinary use of the pardoning power. According to a statement sanctioned by him, he pardoned four hundred and ninety-eight criminals, forty-one of whom were convicted or accused of murder, fifty-two of burglary, five of arson, and eight of robbery.[360] The leader of the Conservative party at that time, B. H. Hill, emphatically declared in a public statement that the governor had no worse motive than "kindness of heart."[361] To sum up the case against the reconstruction government, we have seen that it was extravagant, that it mismanaged the state railroad, and that it pardoned a great many criminals. It was not guilty of the enormities often associated with reconstruction; but it was a government composed of men who obtained political position only through the interference of an outside power--it was the product of a system conceived partly in vengeance, partly in folly, and partly in political strategy, and imposed by force. It was hated partly for what it did, but more for what it was. CHAPTER X CONCLUSION A Confederate veteran recently remarked amid great applause at an assembly in Atlanta that there never was a conqueror so magnanimous as the North, for within six years from the surrender of the southern armies she had allowed the South to take part in her national councils. Nevertheless, within those six years the Congressional Disciplinarians gave the South a discipline which she will never forget. It did not result in permanent estrangement between the North and the South, for sectional bitterness seems extinct. But whether there was any profit in it--whether, in case the South never again attempts to secede, that happy omission will be due to reconstruction--may be doubted. Was there a clearer gain from the humanitarian point of view? We have seen that at the close of the war a spirit of gratitude and philanthropy prevailed among the most influential of the southern white people as regards the negroes. Instead of allowing this spirit to develop and in the course of time to produce its natural results, the North, believing that suffrage was essential to the negro's welfare and progress, forced the South to enfranchise him, by reconstruction. This caused the negro untold immediate harm (since reconstruction was a contributary cause of Kukluxism), and delayed his ultimate advance by giving the friendly spirit of the white people a check in its development from which it has not yet recovered.