Houses of men obnoxious to them were burned; barns, gin-houses, and other property destroyed by night; women were insulted and murders committed.

In the midst of the alarm and irritation caused by these things suddenly there appeared in North Carolina, in the year 1869, a secret society called the "Ku-Klux Klan,' which was first started in one of the farther Southern States, where a similar condition of society prevailed. It was a well-organized body of horsemen who rode at night and in disguise, punishing criminals whom the law had failed to punish, taking on themselves to decide upon the guilty. The sort of mystery they preserved, their striking disguise, their silent and swift night-marches, and their certain vengeance struck terror among the guilty. Governor Holden had established paid spies and secret detectives who stood about in various suspected communities eaves-dropping and reporting private citizens' words and actions. These creatures fled before the Ku-Klux. The governor himself quailed, called for a guard for his house, and tried the effect of proclamations on this midnight police without effect. With the legislature under his control, next winter he procured the passage of a bill giving him power to declare the State or any part of it to be in insurrection, and the authority to raise troops and maintain them if he saw fit. This was called the "Shoffner Bill," and was a step full of danger, for in truth there was no insurrection anywhere nor any prospect of one. The Ku-Klux were not the State. They were not even numerous, though active and dreaded.

They were organ

ized at first only to overawe dangerous and vicious men and to give protection where the law did not. They were like the Regulators before the Revolution, and, like them and like all other self-constituted reformers who act outside of law, they proceeded to excesses, and finally to crimes which speedily led to their downfall.

Such things will be when people are goaded beyond their patience, and history repeats the story in all times.

RECITATION.

THE AMBITIOUS STATESMAN.

FAREWELL, a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope: to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And-when he thinks, good easy man! full surely
His greatness is a ripening-nips his root,
And then he falls as I do.-

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels. How can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?
Love thyself last; cherish those hearts that hate thee.
Corruption wins not more than honesty.

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,

To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fallest,
Thou fallest a blessed martyr.

O Cromwell, Cromwell!
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

SHAKESPEARE.

CHAPTER XL.

THE KU-KLUX KLAN.

1869. THIS time of confusion and lawlessness encouraged the vicious and turbulent to take advantage of it. In the swamps of Robeson county a band of robbers and marauders was organized under a "half-breed" named Lowry. They kept that county and adjoining ones in a state of terror, issuing from their haunts, plundering and murdering in apparent security from law for months, while Governor Holden and his officials kept their attention fixed solely upon political matters and the Ku-Klux. It seems incredible that such a gang could have been permitted to exist for even one month. Governor Holden could run a political newspaper very well, but he was in the wrong place at the head of a government. He lacked not only magnanimity, but he proved essentially weak.

In February, 1870, the Ku-Klux took a mulatto named Outlaw from his own house in Alamance county and hung him in the county-town. Governor Holden declared the county in a state of "insurrection," and sent a company of Federal soldiers to keep the peace. The Ku-Klux having disappeared long before the arrival of the soldiers, there was nothing for them to do. In the following May, John

W. Stephens, a member of the State Senate from Caswell county, was secretly murdered in a room of the courthouse at Yanceyville. It was a mysterious crime, committed when there was a large political meeting going on in the house. The assassins have never been discovered to this day. The Ku-Klux have always disowned the deed. Governor Holden declared that county also in a state of "insurrection," and sent a company of soldiers there, while, as in Alamance, no obstacle to the exercise of the civil law existed. He acted as if panic-struck.

He had called for recruits, and put a fellow named Kirk, who had been distinguished for brutality and cruelty in the Union army in Tennessee, at their head with full power to arrest and imprison as he saw fit. More than one hundred citizens of Caswell and Alamance were now arrested in their houses by this ruffian, and imprisoned. Some of them were hung up by the neck to extort confessions, and were in other respects treated with great brutality. Many of these sufferers were men advanced in life, known and respected as among the best citizens in the State."

Judge Pearson was then chief-justice, and upon an appeal to him by these men for protection from the law he declined to do anything, declaring that he had no power to interfere and could not contend with the governor's authority. The judge of the United States district court for North Carolina was then appealed to-Judge George W. Brooks. He came to Raleigh, and, disregarding Governor Holden's endeavor to deter him, ordered Kirk to bring his prisoners before him, and discharged them at once.