. 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 Clau