at the hands of the yellow chilepeppers. It seems that they
also lived in a land of their own far away across the Nonestic Ocean.
One day a group of yellow chilepeppers, who were visiting the area in
their ship, came ashore and captured some of them and took them back to
Chilepepperland and sold them to plantation owners in the southern part
of Chilepepperland ..."

"Oh, come on!" said Nibbles, who had been very silent all this time.
"You can't sell people."

"In those days you could," Tweaty responded. "At least, according to the
green chilepeppers I talked to. They not only sold the people they
captured as slaves, but they went back again and again to capture more
green chilepeppers and sold them, too. And by the way, a lot of the
green chilepeppers died in the terrible voyage en route."

"But how could the leaders of the yellow chilepeppers allow this to
happen?" asked Ozma. "I would never allow even an unkind remark to pass
between them if I were their leader. And I would have made the yellow
chilepeppers take the green chilepeppers back to their own people
immediately."

"Well, as a matter of fact," continued Tweaty, "the yellow chilepeppers'
leader lived in the north, and he thought very poorly of this
arrangement. A lot of other people agreed with him, and he abolished
slavery forever from the land. But it caused the yellow chilepeppers to
fight among themselves and, to this day, some yellow chilepeppers still
do not consider the green chilepeppers to be equal in status to
themselves--and can be quite discriminating in their treatment of them.
That is, when they can get away with it. They even confine them
economically and socially to areas that are less desirable to live.
Quite naturally, this causes great resentment among many of the green
chilepeppers and sometimes their anger is unleashed in unfortunate ways.
This in turn causes an even greater chasm between the two groups."

"How terrible!" Elephant said. "Chilepepperland sounds like a horrible
place to live! I hope I never even have to visit there."

"It sounds to me," said Ozma, "that if every single chilepepper who
lives in Chilepepperland really wanted to, they could live in Peace and
Love and Harmony alongside each other forever and ever. And then it
would be a perfectly wonderful place to live."

"The problem as I see it," said Hootsey, looking as wise as he could,
"is that for every chilepepper of whatever color whose heart is filled
with lov