the conventions must be submitted to the colored and white people not disfranchised for approval; that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the national constitution must be ratified; and that the State constitutions so adopted must be submitted to and accepted by Congress. Upon this general plan the South was reconstructed, not without much friction, not wholly to the satisfaction of the men who marked out this course of procedure, but with the faith (or at least the trust) on their part that it would restore that section to the Union with genuinely free institutions, that it would protect the emancipated slave in his rights, and that it would substitute for disloyal communities States controlled by those whose interests and traditions lay with the national cause. The reconstruction laws were not vengeful in character; the aim of the men who passed them was not retaliation, not even retribution except in so far as the application of mild penalties to treason might increase the security of the future. To prevent a repetition of the terrible struggle which had just closed was the aim; that a political system had been devised, which both recognized human rights, and by its natural operations would exclude from political power the men who had plunged the country into civil war, was the hope. Within ten years the scheme failed utterly, and what it was designed to prevent had been accomplished upon its ruins. No body of laws can maintain itself in the face of organized murder and terrorism which authority refuses to either punish or prevent.