"Suppose I did,—what then?"
"I should say, then, that Surrey has disgraced himself forever. He has not only outraged his family and his friends, and scandalized society, but he has run against nature itself. It's very plain God Almighty never intended the two races to come together."
"O, he didn't, hey? Had a special despatch from him, that you know all about it? I've heard just such talk before from people who seemed to be pretty well posted about his intentions,—in this particular matter,—though I generally noticed they weren't chaps who were very intimate with him in any other way."
The Captain laughed. "Thank you, Jim, for the compliment; but come, you aren't going to say that nature hasn't placed a barrier between these people and us? an instinct that repels an Anglo-Saxon from a negro always and everywhere?"
"Ho, ho! that's good! why, Captain, if you keep on, you'll make me talk myself into a regular abolitionist. Instinct, hey? I'd like to know, then, where all the mulattoes, and the quadroons, and the octoroons come from,—the yellow-skins and brown-skins and skins so nigh white you can't tell 'em with your spectacles on! The darkies must have bleached out amazingly here in America, for you'd have to hunt with a long pole and a telescope to boot to find a straight-out black one anywhere round,—leastwise that's my observation."
"That was slavery."
"Yes 'twas,—and then the damned rascals talk about the amalgamationists, and all that, up North. 'Twan't the abolitionists; 'twas the slaveholders and their friends that made a race of half-breeds all over the country; but, slavery or no slavery, they showed nature hadn't put any barriers between them,—and it seems to me an enough sight decenter and more respectable plan to marry fair and square than to sell your own children and the mother that bore them. Come, now, ain't it?"
"Well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose it is!"
"You suppose it is! See here,—I've found out something since I've been down here, and have had time to think; 'tain't the living together that troubles squeamish stomachs; it's the marrying. That's what's the matter!"
"Just about!" assented the Captain, with an amused look, "and here's a case in point. Surrey ought to have been shot for marrying one of that degraded race."