To the older people of the South, who really knew what the Ku Klux was before he fell under the magnifying glass of national politics and became the distorted Behemoth upon which to make political capital, the lime-lighted melodramas of Mr. Dixon bring only smiles. The thing originated in the fun-loving plethora of the surcharged idleness of a summer afternoon among a healthy lot of grown-up boys out for a lark and to frighten newly-freed Negroes. Silence and a mystery appals any Negro. It was a mystery and it rode in sheeted silence. It proved more effective than a shotgun to send prowling Negroes to bed. It meant “ghostes” and if a Negro has any religion in his bones it is the religion of ghostes. It was so effective that it grew and was used as an admirable and effective means of a superior race under the bayonet of their conquerors, to maintain the racial integrity against the flood of freed and elevated slaves. It owes its magnified proportions entirely to the red paint of politics. Then, as with lynchings now, the busy and better people of the South gave it neither their salvos nor their sanction. They were too intent upon planting cotton, developing their great mines and rebuilding their country. It was a half-mystic, half-lawless, much-talked-of lodge of half-necessary lawlessness, whose stock in trade was blood-and-thunder mystery and whose purchaser was ignorant, black Superstition.
It was one of the thousand and one means a superior intelligence will always find to control inferior ignorance without butchering him in blocks or pens.
But in its rollicking and rankest days it was never as bad nor had it ever as strong a hold as lynching and homicide have to-day in all sections of the Republic. And it never saw the day when it was half as cruel or killed and flogged together in a month as many black Negroes as Southern cotton mills kill of the white poor children of the South in a day. Compared to the voiceless, swift-moving Juggernaut of the child-killing cotton mill, Ku Klux was the painted, grinning clown of a country show throwing rotten apples at a coon’s head stuck through a sheet!
And as to child-labor—hear this metaphor:
Deep in the hills lies the little stream which is the beginning of the river.
It is concealed in the ground that it may be protected, for so small is its beginning that a too-rough footstep might destroy it, a ruthless track might change it from the destiny of its way to the sea.
Growing, it creeps forth, but under leaf and mold, under the hanging vines and protecting shrubs and only when it is strong enough to resist all efforts to change its course does it flow out into the open and run the race of its life.