your people did with him. But they banished
him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe, recognizing that this
was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took
pity on him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem
witches were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them.
Yes, they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal
with them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our
family from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine
years. The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your
progenitors was an ancestor of mine--for I am of a mixed breed, an
infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your sham
meerschaums that you can color in a week. No, my complexion is the
patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time, I had acquired
a lot of my kin--by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and
another--and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn
perversity of your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away
from me. And so, again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my
blood flows in the veins of any living being who is marketable.

O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have
heard the speeches. Disband these New England societies--nurseries of
a system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if
persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you
into prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still
temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech
you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a
simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before,
or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for
hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this
one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know
that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing
with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five
cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least
throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its
taxes:

Yes, hear your true friend-your only true friend--list to his voice.
Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay--perpetuators
of ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see