But as we shall have occasion to refer to this topic from time to time, as the work progresses, we will not at present allude further to the subject of Ku-Klux trials and their furniture of fiction.
The Klan was thoroughly organized. There were no patch-spots in its system of government. Its tactics of drill were in some sense peculiar, but it sufficiently resembled that adopted by the cavalry branch of the United States army to be mistaken for it in all the leading manoeuvres. The men were perfect in company drill, and were required to attend all Den meetings, or be assessed onerous fines or other penalties. Absenteeism was not, however, one of the strong points of the brotherhood; and a Den rarely moved towards raiding territory without its full quota of men. The raids moved with astonishing celerity--a circumstance which was rendered necessary to the most perfect secrecy of these movements, and was also imperative in view of the long distances to be traversed. The hours between twilight in the evening and dawn, according to a Medean law of the K. K. K., as we have anticipated, could only be appropriated to this labor; and when it is explained that companies of men frequently left the Den rendezvous for raiding objectives forty miles distant, and returned to the former point without dismounting, our conclusion above will be seen to be authorized.
The Grand Cyclops was not only the chief of the Den Council and an absolutist in authority as to its domestic affairs, but was also the chief officer in command of a raid, and must have been looked to for all special directions regarding its conduct. The Exchequer possessed a similar prerogative, and became the orderly or adjutant on the march.
The Klan was the bitter enemy of those unorganized parties of ruffians who made war on their kind in the former's name, and the sum of whose villanies never failed to be debited in this way. Hardly a week passed, during the excitement which gave rise to both, and which they, in turn, converted into a reign of terror whose strong points the Duke of Alva might have studied to advantage, in which the secret organization was not made to suffer under some such confidence arrangement; and to say that its adipose suffered under this bereavement of men's regards which it could so illy spare, will not, we fear, adequately present the situation. It, however, had placed itself in a position by which its motives were liable to be misinterpreted; and as one of its professed foibles was its ability to cover up its tracks in the least mysterious of its transactions; and, as during the French Renaissance, times analogous to these, to wear a mask was esteemed a crime from which all other crimes might be inferred, we doubt whether its right to borrow sympathy on this exchange could be logically maintained.