save the savage instincts of their officers,
terrorize the State. Every white company has been disarmed and disbanded
by our scallawag Governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of
a volcano----"

Old Stoneman scowled as the doctor rose and walked nervously to the window
and back.

"An appeal from you to the conscience of the North might save us," he went
on eagerly. "Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of
children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade
daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a
negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue
of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made
subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure
it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave
of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of
Ancient Civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never
dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his
former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been
so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!"

Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity
with which the Southerner poured out his protest.

"For a Russian to rule a Pole," he went on, "a Turk to rule a Greek, or an
Austrian to dominate an Italian is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped,
flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour, to
shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an
atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror.
My God! when they realize its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to
hold them?"

"I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to
authority," interrupted Stoneman.

"Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of
men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny--these are
unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day
is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to
pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the
slave of a slave----"

"And yet, Doctor," said Stoneman coolly, "manhood suffrage is the one
eternal thing fixed in the nature of Democracy. It is inevitable."

"At the price of raci