Peter Siner had known all along that the unread whites of Hooker’s Bend —­and that included nearly every white person in the village—­considered black men as simple animals; but he had supposed that the more thoughtful men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro-American to the common brotherhood of humanity.  But they did not.

As Peter sat staring into the darkness the whole effect of the dehumanizing of the black folk of the South began to unfold itself before his imagination.  It explained to him the tragedies of his race, their sufferings at the hand of mob violence; the casualness, even the levity with which black men were murdered:  the chronic dishonesty with which negroes were treated:  the constant enactment of adverse legislation against them; the cynical use of negro women.  They were all vermin, animals; they were one with the sheep and the swine; a little nearer the human in form, perhaps, and, oddly enough, one that could be bred to a human being, as testified a multitude of brown and yellow and cream-colored folk, but all marching away, as the Captain had so passionately said, marching away, their forms hidden from human intercourse under a shroud of black, an endless procession marching away, God knew whither!  And yet they were the South’s own flesh and blood.

The horror of such a complex swelled in Peter’s mind to monstrous proportions.  As night thickened at his window, the negro sat dazed and wondering at the mightiness of his vision.  His thoughts went groping, trying to solve some obscure problem it posed.  He thought of the Arkwright boy; he thought of the white men smiling as his mother’s funeral went past the livery-stable; he thought of Captain Renfrew’s manuscript that he was transcribing.  Through all the old man’s memoirs ran a certain lack of sincerity.  Peter always felt amid his labors that the old Captain was making an attorney’s plea rather than a candid exposition.  At this point in his thoughts there gradually limned itself in the brown man’s mind the answer to that enigma which he almost had unraveled on the day he first saw Cissie Dildine pass his window.  With it came the answer to the puzzle contained in the old Captain’s library.  The library was not an ordinary compilation of the world’s thought; it, too, was an attorney’s special pleading against the equality of man.  Any book or theory that upheld the equality of man was carefully excluded from the shelves.  Darwin’s great hypothesis, and every development springing from it, had been banned, because the moment that a theory was propounded of the great biologic relationship of all flesh, from worms to vertebrates, there instantly followed a corollary of the brotherhood of man.

What Christ did for theology, Darwin did for biology,—­he democratized it.  The One descended to man’s brotherhood from the Trinity; the other climbed up to it from the worms.