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     Albert P. Lewis, see above, says some very good things—as where he speaks of the current mania for lynching and the inevitable failure of all efforts to reform men by force. But when he commends the soldiers who in 1861 went forth to “defend the flag and the constitution,” he probably forgets what the flag and the constitution meant in those days. He forgets that they both stood for the right of the white man to buy and sell and torture and t[?]ke the person and the unpaid labor of the black woman, the black man and their children. He forgets that every “loyal” citizen of the United States was by the flag and the constitution compelled to support and defend the “fugitive slave law,” by which the slave who escaped the clutches of an inhuman master must be returned to those clutches, to be dealt with as the brutal passions, revenge, cruelty and unbridled power might dictate.
     In thus saying I have no word of censure for William McKinley and other young men who volunteered to fight for the flag and constitution. At one time I had my name enrolled for the same purpose. Then, as now, everybody seemed to have lost his head. Hate, revenge, unreasoning anger, made the people of the North feel towards their Southern brethren very much as the great majority today feel towards the men and women called “Anarchists,” whether approving or disapproving the act of Leon Czolgosz. Where I then lived the “abolitionist” and “rebel,” or “southern sympathiser,” were about equally hateful and hated. Neither were safe from mob violence, in person or property.
     And thus from age to age history goes on repeating itself. How long. O how long will it be before human beings will cease to enact the wolf and the tiger?