The Daily Phoenix

Strange Words from a Strange Quarter.

In the course of an article deprecating with much earnestness the proposed measures now before Congress, for the suppression of the so-called Ku Klux outrages at the South, the Boston Advertiser, the leading Radical organ of Massachusetts, declares that: "The South must be reconstructed, if at all, by its natural leaders—the men of brains, character and influence—most of whom, of course, were in the late war."

This is sound policy. This opinion is held by hundreds of unprejudiced people—old army officers and citizens—who have lived and owned plantations in the South, or have traveled there.

The present state of things is very bad. We have been trying to create an unnatural state of affairs, and the result is a failure, so long as the only intelligent men are disfranchised, and the ignorant and vicious are permitted to control matters. All accounts agree that the hostility is not felt toward the National Government, but toward certain obnoxious black and white people.

Now, it is certainly too much to expect a very active public sentiment against the Ku Klux, if nothing better is promised than the grotesque travesties of governments which we have seen in many of these States.

Let us try a new remedy, and give brains, and character, and decency a chance. First of all, let us stop this wretched Congressional fooling with great communities as if they were babes or idiots. By attempting to subject whole States to the control of ignorant blacks and whites, who are both ignorant and vicious, we invite the very outrages of which we complain. The country is sick of the whole thing.