sure on which I've set my heart is law, save
one--my Confiscation Act--and this but waits the fulness of time."

The doctor, who was walking back and forth with his hands folded behind
him, paused and said:

"I marvel that a man of your personal integrity could conceive such a
measure; you, who refused to accept the legal release of your debts until
the last farthing was paid--you, whose cruelty of the lip is hideous, and
yet beneath it so gentle a personality, I've seen the pages in the House
stand at your back and mimic you while speaking, secure in the smile with
which you turned to greet their fun. And yet you press this crime upon a
brave and generous foe?"

"A wrong can have no rights," said Stoneman calmly. "Slavery will not be
dead until the landed aristocracy on which it rested is destroyed. I am
not cruel or unjust. I am but fulfilling the largest vision of universal
democracy that ever stirred the soul of man--a democracy that shall know
neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, white nor black. If I use the wild
pulse-beat of the rage of millions, it is only a means to an end--this
grander vision of the soul."

"Then why not begin at home this vision, and give the stricken South a
moment to rise?"

"No. The North is impervious to change, rich, proud, and unscathed by war.
The South is in chaos and cannot resist. It is but the justice and wisdom
of Heaven that the negro shall rule the land of his bondage. It is the
only solution of the race problem. Lincoln's contention that we could not
live half white and half black is sound at the core. When we proclaim
equality, social, political, and economic for the negro, we mean always to
enforce it in the South. The negro will never be treated as an equal in
the North. We are simply a set of cold-blooded liars on that subject, and
always have been. To the Yankee the very physical touch of a negro is
pollution."

"Then you don't believe this twaddle about equality?" asked the doctor.

"Yes and no. Mankind in the large is a herd of mercenary gudgeons or
fools. As a lawyer in Pennsylvania I have defended fifty murderers on
trial for their lives. Forty-nine of them were guilty. All these I
succeeded in acquitting. One of them was innocent. This one they hung. Can
a man keep his face straight in such a world? Could negro blood degrade
such stock? Might not an ape improve it? I preach equality as a poet and
seer who sees a vision beyond the rim of the horizon of to-day.