subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the Negro was the slave of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of Ancient Civilisation, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!"
Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity with which the Southerner poured out his protest.
"For a Russian to rule a Pole," he went on, "a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian, is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realise its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them?"
"I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to authority," interrupted Stoneman.
"Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the slave of a slave"
