Only the terrible, mysterious fact of death was certain. Accusative by secret denunciation; sentence without hearing; execution without warning, mercy, or appeal. In the deaths alone, terrible beyond utterance, but in the manner of death—the secret, intangible doom from which fate springs—more terrible still in the treachery which made a neighbor a disguised assassin—most horrible of all the feuds and hates which history portrays.
"And then the wounded—those who escaped the harder fate—the whipped, the mangled, the bleeding, and the torn; men despoiled of manhood; women gravid with dead children ; bleeding backs, broken limbs! Ah! The wounded in this silent warfare were more thousands than those who groaned upon the slopes of Gettysburg.
"Dwellings, and schools, and churches burned; people driven from their homes and dwelling in the woods and fields. The poor, the weak, the despised, maltreated and persecuted—by whom? Always the same intangible presence, the same invisible power. Well did it name itself 'The Invisible Empire' Unseen and unknown. In one state, ten thousand; and another, twenty thousand; in another, forty thousand; in all, an army greater than the Rebellion, from the moldering remains of which it sprung, could ever put in the field. An 'Invisible Empire,' with a trained and disciplined army of masked midnight marauders, makes war upon the weakling 'powers' which the Wise Men had set up in the lately rebellious territory."
Is there any good reason why in the year 1921, forty years after the Ku Klux Klan was suppressed, it’s terrible record should be again repeated? An abundant apology for the review of this tragic history is the fact that misguided people have resurrected the name and many functions of the old Klan in a newly organized society, which has added to its anti-negro platform anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, and anti-alien born. It is to the credit of our country that there has come a loud protest from people both North and .South against any renewal of such an unlawful night-riding association with its hypocritical profession of super-patriotism and its supplanting the orderly administration of the courts.
