ho ever heard of such
a thing, saying to a gentleman, 'now you may go!' I gad, I'll go with
you, and we'll shoot 'em down."

"No," said the Major, and now with his hands behind him he was slowly
pacing the floor. "That won't do."

"Why won't it do?" Gid cried. "Has the time come when a white man must
stand all sorts of abuse simply because he is white? Must he stand
flat-footed and swallow every insult that a scoundrel is pleased to
stuff into his mouth?"

The Major sat down. "Let me remind you of something," he said. "For the
average man, under ordinary circumstances, it is enough to have simple
justice on his side, but on our side we must have more than justice. No
people in the world were ever situated as we now are, for even by our
brothers we shall be deemed wrong, no matter which way we turn."

"Ah," Gid cried, "then what's the use of calculating our turn? If we are
to be condemned anyway, what's the----"

"Hold on a moment," the Major struck in, "and I will tell you. Sentiment
is against us; literature, with its roots running back into the harsh
soil of politics, is against us; and----"

"No measured oratory, John. Get down on the ground."

"Wait, I tell you!" the Major demanded. "I must get to it in my own way.
If your advice were followed, we should never be able to elect another
president. The bloody shirt would wave from every window in the North,
and from the northern point of view, justly so; and reviewed even by the
disinterested onlooker, we have not been wholly in the right."

"The deuce we haven't!" Gid shouted, his eyes bulging.

"No, not wholly; we couldn't be," the Major continued. "As
self-respecting men, as Anglo-Saxons, we could not submit to the
domination of former slaves. It was asking too much. We had ruled the
nation, and though we were finally overpowered, we could not accept the
negro as a ruler."

"John, I know all that as well as you do; we have talked it many a
time, but what I want to get at is this: Has a man the right to resent
an insult? I was never cruel to a negro. I like him in his place, like
him better than I do the average white man, to tell the plain truth, for
between him and me there is the tie of irresponsibility, of
shiftlessness; but I don't want him to insult me; don't want to stand
any more from him than I would from a white man. You spoke of not being
able to elect another president. Why should we put up with so much
merely to say that a democrat is preside