the House stand at your back and mimic you while speaking, secure in the smile with which you turned to greet their fun. And yet you press this crime upon a brave and generous foe?"
"A wrong can have no rights," said Stoneman, calmly. "Slavery will not be dead until the landed aristocracy on which it rested is destroyed. I am not cruel or unjust. I am but fulfilling the largest vision of universal democracy that ever stirred the soul of man—a democracy that shall know neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, white nor black. If I use the wild pulse-beat of the rage of millions, it is only a means to an end—this grander vision of the soul."
"Then why not begin at home this vision, and give the stricken South a moment to rise?"
"No. The North is impervious to change, rich, proud, and unscathed by war. The South is in chaos and cannot resist. It is but the justice and wisdom of Heaven that the Negro shall rule the land of his bondage. It is the only solution of the race problem. Lincoln's contention that we could not live half white and half black is sound at the core. When we proclaim equality, social, political, and economic for the Negro, we mean always to enforce it in the South. The Negro will never be treated as an equal in the North. We are simply a set of cold-blooded liars on that subject, and always have been. To the Yankee the very physical touch of a Negro is pollution."
"Then you don't believe this twaddle about equality?" asked the doctor.
"Yes and no. Mankind in the large is a herd of mer-
