“Judge for yourself, you who know all—­what man among us Northerners can feel, as I do, what those hapless men may have deserved?—­I who have day and night before me the brand of their cruelty, filling my heart with fire?  I need all my strength, all my reason, at times to say to myself, as I say to others—­’Are not these slaveholders men of like passions with yourself?  What have they done which you would not have done in their place?’ I have never read that key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  I will not even read this Dred, admirable as I believe it to be.”

“Why should you?” said Claude.  “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.”