The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1868-08-30
A POLITICAL EXODUS.

"Not only" says the New York Herald,
does the Southern Radical darby slip away
from his Northern driver at the critical mo-
mtnt, but even the carpet Dagger is deluslve."
True enough. From time to time the tele-
graph informs us that a prominent Radical in
Georgia, Alabama, or some other State, has
hung up his carpet-bag and concluded to
make himself decently and honestly at home
in the South, on the basis of amity good faith,
and community and sympathy of interests
with the body of the Southern people Such
examples are contagious. Here in Louisiana
the contagion has taken effect in several nota-
BILE instances. Who can say that it will not
soon become epidemic? At all events, every
one of those political raiders, popularity known
as carpet-baggers, whose heads are not as plen-
tifully lacking in brains as on their first
coming their bags were of valuables, must
perceive that their own welfare, if they design
permanent residence in the South, demands
that they should, as soon as possible, make
peace and cultivate fellowship with the white
citizens whom they have made their bitter enc
mics by identifying themselves with whole
sale and retail system of rapacity. Nothing
could relieve them from this necessity but an
entire reconstruction as well as Encouragement
of Southern society And this, even if posi-
BILE, could not be accomplished by any kind
of forcing process of Radical legislation in the
shape of social equality or social subversion
bills, in the lifetime of one generation. The
whole tribe of carpet-baggers will be in their
graves long before the first solid foundation
is laid for the desiderated reorganization, or
DISCRIMINATION of society
Southern negroes, by thousands, begin to
see the delusiveness of looking forward to the
general collapse and dissolution of the pres
ent social order. They are waking up from
the infatuation of supposing that an execu-
tive proclamation or a legislative enactment
can, of itself, effect practical and perma-
nent change in the relations between class and
class and race and race; and following q
wise instinct, they are preparing to recognize,
in all candor, the position which nature and
history have given the whites, and to adjust
themselves to this position on terms Of the
highest mutual advantage of the two races.
No et-bagger who expects to make his
home in the South hereafter, can afford to
look with indifference on this increasing tenn
per and tendency of the eolored people. 1t is
clear that they can scarcely count, henceforth,
with perfect assurance, even on the partial
support of these people. And yet, deprived
of the solid support of the Southern negroes,
their political underpinning in the South is
knocked out, and they become as forlorn and
helpless as a cat without claws in neither
locality where claws airs supposed to be indis.
| pensable to feline comfort and safety.
| Sucl reflections are not the less rife in the
carpet-bag circle because unexpressed; and il
is not marvellous that the more thoughtful and
forecasting carpet-baggers are found letting
themselves out of this circle, with as much
grace as they may, in the spirit of a shrewd
rat emigrating from sinking ship.
Yet all who abandon the profession of car
pet-baggery, or political utilization with car
! - L-------------A---- sAt05- JiIS
side of the "upper dog in the fight" Some
of them must have seen, from their inside
view of Radical ideas and propensities, thai
ultimately, under the ruinous rIisrule of Rad
icalism, there would be, here in the South,
neither upper nor under dogs in the fight
but that all would sink together, in a state
| of canicular manginess, maceration and mis-.
cry, never before witnessed since the days Of
Job, whose dogs were too weak to bark and
too poor to cast shadow. These are led tc
renounce Radicalism because CT their fnal
conviction that it MEANS in its ultimate de.
velopment, universal ruin, and can mean To-
| gicallY nothing else.