cause of defeat, the small effects of the accession of Fox. He concluded that the American War had less influence on Parliament than was commonly supposed; and that enlistments were not so difficult, nor the war so generally unpopular, as has been thought.
Professor Dunning of Columbia University then spoke on the Undoing of Reconstruction. Contrasting the abundant possession of political power by the negroes in 1870, when reconstruction was complete, with their present exclusion from the exercise of political rights, he characterized the three chief periods of the process through which this has come about. The first period, which had already begun during the years of reconstruction, and was complete by 1877, was marked by the ejection of the blacks from the governments of the Southern states especially through the "Mississippi plan" of systematic intimidation. The second, 1877-1890, during which the balance of national political parties made partisan Federal legislation impossible, while the judiciary rejected the Civil Rights Acts, was the period of fraud as distinguished from force. The last decade had been marked by open assertion of the necessity of repression and of white rule, and by systematic endeavors, through constitutional revision, to legalize what had before been done illegally. Professor Dunning dwelt on the thoughts, that the problem of the co-existence of the two races in the United States could not be settled by the mere abolition of slavery; and that the undoing of reconstruction had shown that it could not be settled on the basis of equality.
In the discussion which ensued. Professor Hart of Harvard, alluding to the various aspects under which the subject might be discussed, confined himself to the question how far success had been attained in the great endeavor to abolish the distinction of color in legal relations. He touched upon the abolition of slavery, the extent to which there was equality before the courts, the exclusion from the franchise, and the failure to secure social equality. Mr. Percy N. Booth of Louisville spoke of the drift of the Southern negroes into the black states, from the highlands into the lowlands, and away from the villages,—the apparent tendency toward isolation of the races. Dr. Theodore Clarke Smith discussed the question, what the Republican leaders of the reconstruction movement expected. He showed that most were uncertain; that Stevens's aim was to secure party supremacy and the results of the war; that Sumner, Wilson and Greeley, filled with the spirit of the liberalism of their generation, had no doubts. The negro was a man, therefore give him a vote. He was a man, therefore he would use it well. Stevens and many others thought that there would be
