de. "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? I often wish I could make Americans understand the
feeling of England to you--the honest pride, as of a mother who has
brought into the world the biggest baby that ever this earth beheld,
and is rather proud of its stamping about and beating her in its
pretty pets. Only the old lady does get a little cross when she hears
you talk of the wrongs which you have endured from her, and teaching
your children to hate us as their ancient oppressors, on the ground of
a foolish war, of which every Englishman is utterly ashamed, and in
the result of which he glories really as much as you do."

"Don't talk of 'you,' Claude! You know well what I think on that
point