ority of those present were of the same way of thinking.

He was succeeded by a heavy-browed, middle-aged man, slightly bent, and
with hair a little turned to gray, but still hale, athletic, and in the
prime and vigor of manhood. His pantaloons and waistcoat were of the
common home-spun, and he used, now and then, a word of the country
dialect; but as a stump-speaker, he was infinitely superior to the more
polished orator who had preceded him.

He, too, advocated secession as a right and a duty--separation, now and
forever from the dirt-eating, money-loving Yankees, who, he was ashamed
to say, had the same ancestry, and worshiped the same God as himself. He
took the bold ground that slavery is a curse to both the black and the
white, but that it was forced upon this generation before it was born,
by these same greedy, grasping Yankees, who would sell not only the
bones and sinews of their fellowmen, but--worse than that--their own
souls, for gold. It was forced upon them without their consent, and now
that it had become interwoven with all their social life, and was a
necessity of their very existence, the hypocritical Yankees would take
it from them, because, forsooth, it was a sin and a wrong--as if _they_
had to bear its responsibility, or the South could not settle its own
account with its Maker!

'Slavery is now,' he continued, 'indispensable to us. Without it,
cotton, rice, and sugar will cease to grow, and the South will starve.
What if it works abuses? What if the black, at times, is overburdened,
and his wife and daughters debauched? Man is not perfect any
where--there are wrongs in every society. It is for each one to give his
account, in such matters, to his God. But in this are we worse than
they? Are there not abuses in society at the North? Are not their
laborers overworked? While sin here hides itself under cover of the
night, does it not there stalk abroad at noonday? If the wives and
daughters of blacks are debauched here, are not the wives and daughters
of whites debauched there? and will not a Yankee barter away the
chastity of his own mother for a dirty dollar? Who fill our brothels?
Yankee women! Who load our penitentiaries, crowd our whipping-posts,
debauch our slaves, and cheat and defraud us all? Yankee men! And I say
unto you, fellow-citizens,' and here the speaker's form seemed to dilate
with the wild enthusiasm which possessed him, ''come out from among
them; be ye separate, and touch not th