carpet-bagger. He has brought upon us worse evils than the plagues of Egypt; he was poorer than Pharaoh's lean kine when he first came among us, and he has devoured until his eyes stick out with fatness; he has bred a black infection more deadly than the black plague; he has kindled a fire that has burned and consumed for ten years; the victims of his greed and wrath outnumber the victims in the French massacre; and on the eve of an election, in flooding the land with Southern outrages, he dwarfs the eruptions of Vesuvius. But he is musical, for well I know that when I strike the crapet bagger I 'wake to ecstacy the living liar.'"

In the same speech (1875), discussing the great war of 1861'65, he gave utterance to the following words: "The first inquiry of the philosophical historian when, in after and calmer times, he shall sit down to write the history of that great war, will be, Why did it occur? What was the true motive, aml in the absence of which there would have been no war? With shame I say it—in view of our boasted civilization—of our religious professions, of our common treasure, blood and sorrows in gaining the victory which led to the establishment of the Union that gigantic war was waged for mercenary gain. The material results of that conflict—the destruction of property and financial distress—are not permanent. Industry, skill and economy will soon restore the one and bring relief from the other. These are things of the earth—earthy.' Among the temporary political consequences are sectional animosity and distrust, from which have issued sectional legislation and persecution of the South; the control of the government by a low grade of intellect and a lower order of men; the Fifteenth Amendment; the abandonment of law and constitutional government, and the consequent tendency to centralization and despotism. Perhaps the only permanent political issues of the war are the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution." In his speech in the Senate in the same year on the military

despotism and carpet-bagger government in Louisiana, Judge Norwood denounced those monstrosities and the Republican party's policy of so-called reconstruction, in words that should be read and remembered for their broad statesmanship, their fervent patriotism, and their absolute truthfulness. He said: "Then there was enacted a drama which, but for the calamities with which it was fraught, would rank as the greatest farce known in history. Then came that grand abortion called reconstruction. In its train have followed more pangs and woes than war with all its horrors has. It was a crime, because it was a wilful trampling of the constitution in the dust. It was a dishonor, because it was an insult to a fettered people. It was a disgrace to American statesmanship. It was a blow at the life of the republic. It disfranchised the intelligent, the virtuous, the honorable citizens of the South, and gave power over them to the ignorant, the licentious and the base. It gave those who had neither property nor education the power to tax without limit the owners of the remnant of property left to them by the war. It bound the hands of the whites and turned them over unprotected to the unbounded rapacity and savage brutality of the blacks. All this was done by the Republican party only to perpetuate its own existence and keep control of the government.

Reconstruction will be written down by the philosophical historian not only as the greatest folly of all time, but as the worst crime against civilization, human progress and self-government, that was ever perpetrated through the cunning or wickedness of man. It has no justification."

These are facts which will never be forgotten by the descendants of those who were forced to endure the horrors of the awful period so vividly yet faithfully described by one so well qualified to speak fittingly of them. No one who did not see and feel them can have an adequate conception of the situation in the Southern States for ten years after the four years of war that h»d devastated and prostrated them, but an approximate com

prehension of it can be had by the reading of these speeches of Judge Norwood, and the reader will err who suspects that the language of exaggeration is used in them.

Judge Norwood is the author of three books—"Plutocracy, or American White Slavery"; "Mother Goose Carved by a Commentator"; and a satire in verse, of eight cantos, on the political situation under McKinley's and Marcus A. Hanna's administration. His "Plutocracy, or American White Slavery," was the first book of fiction based on the peculiar economic and labor conditions that followed Republican rule after the War between the States. Since its appearance many books have been written on that line. It is fitting, too, before concluding this sketch, to record the following facts:

Judge Norwood was the first Democrat from the South who was seated in the United States Senate after the War between the States. He was the first in Congress to attack the Republican party with burlesque, irony, ridicule and satire. This he did in his speech on the Civil Rights Bill, which at once gave him a national reputation. He was the first in Congress to deliver a set speech on the meaning and scope of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, his line of reasoning being almost the same as that subsequently taken by the United States Supreme Court in construing that amendment. He was the first public writer to express the opinion that the only effective safeguard against the imminent danger to our government, apparent in the acquirement of unlimited wealth by a few persons, is to limit by organic law the accumulation to a fixed sum, and that all increment in excess should go to the Federal Government to be applied, under equitable distribution, to the education of the illiterate poor. This was in the last of his above-named literary productions.

Judge Norwood was married in 1853 to Miss Anna Maria Hendree, of Richmond, Virginia, who died in 1901. Three sons and a daughter were born to them, of whom only one son and the daughter are living. T. K. OGLESBY.