“Variety of shade, my dear Bengal, is none of our business.  If you make a division you destroy the property and the principle.  We don’t represent the South:  if we did, my stars! how the abolitionists would start up,—­eh!  Now, there’s a right smart chance of big aristocrat folks in the district, and they think something of their niggers, and some are fools enough to think niggers have souls just as white as we.  That’s where the thing don’t strike our morals alike.  It’s all right to let such folks represent us-that it is!  It tells down north.”

“I goes in for that!  It puts a polished face on the brown side of things.  That’s the way I puts it on when I gets among the big ’uns on ’Change.  I talks to one, shakes hands with another, touches my hat to the president of the bank; and then them what don’t know thinks how I do a little in the taking a corner of notes line!” “In the same sly way that directors of banks do,” interrupts a voice, sullenly and slow.  It was long Joe Morphet, the constable’s sponge, who did a little in the line of nigger trailing, and now and then acted as a contingent of Graspum.  Joe had, silently and with great attention, listened to their consultations, expecting to get a hook on at some point where his services would play at a profit; but it all seemed beyond his comprehension-amounted to nothing.

“There’s something in Joe, gentlemen!  But our genteelest folks don’t alway do the genteelest things, arter all.  Right-right!  Joe’s right!” Graspum has suddenly comprehended Joe’s logic, and brightens up with the possession of a new idea, that at first was inclined to get crosswise in his mind, which he has drilled in the minor details of human nature rather than the political dignity of the state.  Joe’s ideas are ranging over the necessity of keeping up a good outside for the state; Graspum thinks only of keeping up the dignity of himself.  “Well, give in, fellers; Joe’s right clever.  He’s got head enough to get into Congress, and if polished up wouldn’t make the worst feller that ever was sent:  he wouldn’t, to my certain knowledge.  Joe’s clever!  What great men do with impunity little men have no scruples in following; what the state tolerates, knaves may play upon to their own advantage.  To keep up the dignity of a slave state, slave dealers must keep up dignity among themselves:  the one cannot live without the other.  They must affect, and the state must put on, the dignity; and northerners what aint gentlemen must be taught to know that they aint gentlemen.”  This is the conclusion to which Graspum has arrived on the maturest reflection of a few minutes:  it conforms with the opinion and dignity of slaveocracy-must be right, else the glorious Union, with the free-thinking north unfortunately attached, could never be preserved.  It’s the nut of a glorious compact which the south only must crack, and will crack.  Graspum apologised for the thing having escaped his memory so long.  He remembered that southerners left no stone unturned