had begun her benefactions by endowing an institution for homeless cats, and her efforts at the South for the negroes were simply to add specimens to her menagerie. The preacher rejects her ideas as "maudlin;" he agrees only to establish between his work and hers "a great mutual ignorance." He considers her mission as simply "to teach crack-brained theories of social and political equality to four millions of ignorant negroes, some of whom are but fifty years removed from the African jungles," and separate them by an impossible social order from their only real friends, their former masters. This the labors of General Fiske at Nashville and Armstrong at Hampton are summarized in that of the five times millionairess from Boston. It would be well, at this point, if space permitted, to compare this picture with that of Tour- gee's of the school teacher from the North, or the reminiscences of Booker T. Washington of the Yankee woman in West Virginia, and of the Yankee teacher at Hampton.
For the Freedmen's Bureau he also presents but one character, the Rev. Ezra Perkins. Perkins is described as a former preacher in Michigan, who lost his church on account of unsavory rumors about his character; he then eked out his living as a book agent, and as an insurance agent. As to the bureau itself, the following is said: "If the devil himself had devised an instrument for creating race antagonism and strife, he could not have improved on the bureau in its actual workings. Had clean-handed, competent agents been possible, it might have accomplished good. These agents were, as a rule, the riff-raff and trash of the North. It was the supreme opportunity of army cooks, teamsters, fakirs and broken down preachers who had turned insurance agents." It may be suspected that there was more or less truth in this, but it must be remembered that the able and humane General Howard, who is even now, in his old age, establishing an educational institution for the whites of the Cumberland Gap, was at the head of this bureau. The description as the the bureau appeared to the South can hardly be considered as complete without Howard.
The agents of reconstruction at the South are also painted in very dark colors. One of the leaders of these was Simon Legree, taken alive, so to speak, from the pages of Mrs. Stowe, and converted, only that instead of whipping slaves, he now stripes the whites. He was seconded by Dave Haley, also from Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Tim Shelby, who had run away from the Shelby farm in Kentucky and received a good education in Canada, but returned to plague the South. The carpet-bag governments are described in the same sable colors, their thefts and extravagances unrelieved by one good character or one good act. The leaders ultimately go North, Legree apparently developing at length into J. P. Morgan—Shelby alone being so unfortunate as to fall the first victim of the Ku Klux Klan.
This organization, which appears so vividly as seen by a white man, in the pages of A Fool's Errand, is here represented as a law and order league. Its first operations are spoken of as necessary and justifiable; though later, having fallen into the hands of young men, who afterwards turned Populists, it committed petty crimes, such as whipping negroes and worrying Northern school teachers. It can hardly be considered that this Southern organization, whatever its justification, is adequately described in this work. The writer became personally acquainted with a mulatto, in attendance at the Oberlin Theological Seminary and a graduate of Fiske University, who had only escaped with his life from the Klan, and whose only offense was that he opened a school in the black belt of Mississippi for colored children. The later attempt of the negroes to gain political recognition by an alliance with the farmers and Populists is also detailed, and the chief leader is a sensual young scalawag, a poor white, called Allan McLeod. He proves to be a villain and coward, and the personal rival and enemy of the hero, Charles Gaston. He is the old-fashioned villain, embodying every unmanly vice under a plausible
