This act further provided that upon failure to furnish bond the free person of color could be ordered to leave the State, and, upon failure to leave, be subjected to corporal punishment within a certain time, and if still contumacious, could be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period. The other act granted to the immense black majority what the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, for almost half a century, had denied to the feeble minority of free blacks who had entered their borders: “In every case civil and criminal in which a person of color is a party or which affects the person or property of a person of color, persons of color shall be competent witnesses.”[199] In its day and since, this legislation has been roundly denounced. Those in control of Federal politics saw in it a peaceful settlement of great questions which threatened their supremacy, and bitterly and unreservedly reprobated it, stirring up public opinion in that section, which yet flushed with its conquest, was unwilling to permit any interference with its great mission of “putting the bottom rail on top.” The conquerors had preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Those were two immense achievements, even if ruthlessly attained. As terrible as was the price which the South paid for the abolition of slavery, it was not too great, taking all things into consideration; and the manner of the abolition was such, also, that in time it must have given rise to as it did eventually produce, that mutual respect between the sections which had not before existed. While Emancipation, being confiscation of property without due process of law, can never be legally justified, and only can be excused as a war measure, yet, if the Southern people, white and black, could only be made to see conditions as they are now in the South and to realize that posterity does fairly demand some consideration from those who bring it into being, one hundred years will not have passed before it will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Emancipation was more beneficial to the South than to the North. This statement is made with a full appreciation of the fact that the War, Emancipation and Reconstruction so reduced the South and checked its industrial development, that thirty years were required from the inception of the War to bring that section again up to the position it had reached in 1860, in point of wealth and industry. War and Emancipation can therefore be excused, but Reconstruction will ever remain an ineffaceable stain upon the conquerors. Yet, as an emetic sometimes produces good which nothing else can bring about, so Reconstruction may in time be shown to have been not without its good.