chief officer a Grand Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two Lictors.

WORE WHITE MASKS

The only germ in their constitution from which the "Imperial Wizard" Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and mufflers for their feet.

Only after the Pulaski organization had entertained itself for many nights did the phenomenon present itself which was to make the Klan a weapon in the progress of post-war reconstruction. It was the discovery that the African negro was twice as fearful of mysticism and mystery as the white man. It taught the white men of Tennessee and neighboring states that they had a means of their own of preventing what they considered political mismanagement and social insolence in the control by northerners and freedmen of the state government.

BECOMES MILITARY ORGANIZATION

The Pulaski riders made themselves popular. Young men of neighboring towns organized brother Klans. When southern society found itself a Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, it grasped the Pulaski idea as the means for pulling itself up again. The Klan became a military organization, with the purpose of keeping order among the negroes by intimidating them. Mysticism in the order grew. Humor grew with it, and by the time the states of the north discovered that the south had an organization which was in purpose a society of regulators, the young southern war veterans were donning their white robes and cardboard hats with a human skull and two thigh bones as the symbols of allegiance.

The oath which the grand cyclops administered has been preserved in southern diaries and documents. It was taken in a solemn manner as the knights were grouped amid the bones. The oath follows.

Ku-Klux horsemen who rode white-sheeted through the south in the nights of 1866 regarded themselves as upholders of sectional patriotism.

They considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the New Englanders who threw the English tea overboard into Boston harbor nearly 100 years before. Their protests, and the acts of intimidation by which they enforced their protests were against the white "carpetbagger" from the north, the negro freedman to whom liberty meant arrogant office-holding, and the "scalawag," by which terms they designated those deserters from the southern aristocracy who had joined the ranks of the northern stranger.

The second stage came within a year after the secret body had its birth, when the band of burlesquers became a band of regulators.

To the south, the reconstruction acts which congress passed in 1867 were pernicious. The one-time white confederate soldier believed that the congressional legislation made official mismanagement permanent. He saw negroes organized into the militia. He saw his former slaves voting twice and thrice at elections where he himself had to pass, literally, under bayonets to reach the polls. He disliked the freedman's bureau, which substituted northern alien machinery for the old patriarchal relation between white employer and black employe. He heard drunken negroes at his gates in the night. He saw the "carpetbagger" urging upon the freedman civic rights which he knew the latter was not educated enough to perform.

FIRST OBJECTS POLITICAL

These were the prejudices against which the original Ku-Klux Klan threw itself. They were surface indications of an historical development. They had nothing to do with the racial and religious biases which the present Klan attempted to propagate. To the present Klan, the old Klan, in its first stage, was unrelated. In its second stage it was related only in its methods of terrorism and its removal of justice from the courts to the masques until its own leaders were powerless to check it.

The Klan early fell a victim to the abuses inseparable from secrecy. It happened that Tennessee, the birthplace of the hooded institution, was also the first southern state to find itself turned upside down in reconstruction. "Dem Ku-Kluxes," as the negro called the mysterious union, became a band of regulators. Their first official convention was held in Nashville early in 1867.

The Klan, which, until then, had been bound together only by the deference which priority rights gave to the grand cyclops of the parental Pulaski "den," was organized into the "Invisible Empire of the South." It was ruled by a grand wizard of the whole empire, a grand dragon of each realm, or state, a grand titan of each dominion, or county, a grand cyclops of each den, and staff officers with names as equally suggestive of Arabian Nights.

LAWS DEFINE OBJECTS

For the first time its laws defined serious objects. First was the duty of protecting people, presumably white southerners, from indignities and wrongs; second was the duty of succoring the suffering, particularly among the families of dead confederate soldiers; finally was the oath to defend "the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto," and of the states also, to aid in executing all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than by jury.

It is these purposes which Imperial Wizard Simmons of the modern clan pretends to perpetuate, plus persecutions of Jews, Catholics and negroes, while denying charges of terrorizing outbreaks.

The Nashville convention chose Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, the confederate cavalry leader, as its supreme ruler. He is known to have increased the membership of the hooded horsemen in the old south to 550,000. Among his aides were Generals John B. Gordon, A.H. Colquitt, G.T. Anderson, A.B. Lawton, W.J. Hardee, John C. Brown, George W. Gordon and Albert Pike. The latter became one of the foremost authorities of Masonry.

Terrorism spread, until during the political campaign which preceded the 1868 presidential election, 2,000 persons were killed and injured in Louisiana by Ku-Klux Klansmen, who rode at night, disguised as freebooters, and according to James G. Blaine, defeated candidate for the presidency at a later date, hesitated at no cruelty.

In the north, in the years immediately after the civil war, the original Ku-Klux Klan was called a conspiracy.

In the south, where society was being ground in the mills of reconstruction, the Klan started its midnight rovings as an instrument of moral force. But within three years its period of usefulness, as the white southerner saw it useful, was over.

Its founders had played with it as with an exciting bonfire. During the months, however, when former confederate soldiers used it to frighten