Two Years Ago, Volume I | Page 2

about us and see what is to be done. Your wisest Englishmen justly complain of us, that our 'platform' is as yet a merely negative one; that we define what the South shall not do, but not what the North shall. Ere four years be over, we will have a 'positive platform,' at which you shall have no cause to grumble."
"I still think with Marie, that your 'positive platform' is already made for you, plain as the sun in heaven, as the lightnings of Sinai. Free those slaves at once and utterly!"
"Impatient idealist! By what means? By law, or by force? Leave us to draw a _cordon, sanitaire_ round the tainted States, and leave the system to die a natural death, as it rapidly will if it be prevented from enlarging its field. Don't fancy that a dream of mine. None know it better than the Southerners themselves. What makes them ready just now to risk honour, justice, even the common law of nations and humanity, in the struggle for new slave territory? What but the consciousness that without virgin soil, which will yield rapid and enormous profit to slave labour, they and their institution must be ruined!"
"The more reason for accelerating so desirable a consummation, by freeing the slaves at once."
"Humph!" said Stangrave with a smile. "Who so cruel at times as your too benevolent philanthropist? Did you ever count the meaning of those words? Disruption of the Union, an invasion of the South by the North; and an internecine war, aggravated by the horrors of a general rising of the slaves, and such scenes as Hayti beheld sixty years ago. If you have ever read them, you will pause ere you determine to repeat them on a vaster scale."
"It is dreadful, Heaven knows, even in thought! But, Stangrave, can any moderation on your part ward it off? Where there is crime, there is vengeance; and without shedding of blood is no remission of sin."
"God knows! It may be true: but God forbid that I should ever do aught to hasten what may come. Oh, Claude, do you fancy that I, of all men, do not feel at moments the thirst for brute vengeance?"
Claude was silent.
"Judge for yourself, you who know all--what man among us Northerners can feel, as I do, what those hapless men may have deserved?--I who have day and night before me the brand of their cruelty, filling my heart with fire? I need all my strength, all my reason, at times to say to myself, as I say to others--'Are not these slaveholders men of like passions with yourself? What have they done which you would not have done in their place?' I have never read that key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. I will not even read this Dred, admirable as I believe it to be."
"Why should you?" said Claude. "Have you not a key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, more pathetic than any word of man's or woman's?"
"But I do not mean that! I will not read them, because I have the key to them in my own heart, Claude: because conscience has taught me to feel for the Southerner as a brother, who is but what I might have been; and to sigh over his misdirected courage and energy, not with hatred, not with contempt: but with pity, all the more intense the more he scorns that pity; to long, not merely for the slaves' sake, but for the masters' sake, to see them--the once chivalrous gentlemen of the South--delivered from the meshes of a net which they did not spread for themselves, but which was round their feet, and round their fathers', from the day that they were born. You ask me to destroy these men. I long to save them from their certain doom!"
"You are right, and a better Christian than I am, I believe. Certainly they do need pity, if any sinners do; for slavery seems to be--to judge from Mr. Brooks's triumph--a great moral curse, and a heavier degradation to the slaveholder himself, than it can ever be to the slave."
"Then I would free them from that curse, that degradation. If the negro asks, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' have they no right to ask it also? Shall I, pretending to love my country, venture on any rash step which may shut out the whole Southern white population from their share in my country's future glory? No; have but patience with us, you comfortable liberals of the Old World, who find freedom ready made to your hands, and we will pay you all. Remember, we are but children yet; our sins are the sins of youth,--greediness, intemperance, petulance, self-conceit. When we are purged from our youthful sins, England will not be ashamed of her child."
"Ashamed of you?