than selecting some one class for
discouragement and degradation, and that the white race could hold its
own, with the Negroes or against them, in any conceivable state of
political equality. They listened to the colonel's quiet argument that
no State could be freer or greater or more enlightened than the
average of its citizenship, and that any restriction of rights that
rested upon anything but impartial justice, was bound to re-act, as
slavery had done, upon the prosperity and progress of the State. They
listened, which the colonel regarded as a great point gained, and they
agreed in part, and he could almost understand why they let their
feelings govern their reason and their judgment, and said no word to
prevent an unfair and unconstitutional scheme from going forward to a
successful issue. He knew that for a white man to declare, in such a
community, for equal rights or equal justice for the Negro, or to take
the Negro's side in any case where the race issue was raised, was to
court social ostracism and political death, or, if the feeling
provoked were strong enough, an even more complete form of extinction.

So the colonel was patient, and meant to be prudent. His own arguments
avoided the stirring up of prejudice, and were directed to the higher
motives and deeper principles which underlie society, in the light of
which humanity is more than race, and the welfare of the State above
that of any man or set of men within it; it being an axiom as true in
statesmanship as in mathematics, that the whole is greater than any
one of its parts. Content to await the uplifting power of industry and
enlightenment, and supremely confident of the result, the colonel went
serenely forward in his work of sowing that others might reap.

_Twenty-two_

The atmosphere of the Treadwell home was charged, for the next few
days, with electric currents. Graciella knew that her aunt was engaged
to Colonel French. But she had not waited, the night before, to hear
her aunt express the wish that the engagement should be kept secret.
She was therefore bursting with information of which she could
manifest no consciousness without confessing that she had been
eavesdropping--a thing which she knew Miss Laura regarded as
detestably immoral. She wondered at her aunt's silence. Except a
certain subdued air of happiness there was nothing to distinguish Miss
Laura's calm demeanor from that of any other day. Graciella had
determined upon he