"Well, they've got to hang when they commit hanging crimes," replied Cyrus stubbornly. "There's no way out of that. It's just, ain't it?"
"Yes, I suppose so," admitted Gabriel, "though, for my part, I've a feeling against capital punishment—except, of course, in cases of rape, where, I confess, my blood turns against me."
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—that's the law of God, ain't it?"
"The old law, yes—but why not quote the law of Christ instead?"
"It wouldn't do—not with the negroes," returned Cyrus, who entertained for the Founder of Christianity something of the sentimental respect mingled with an innate distrust of His common-sense with which he regarded His disciple.
"We can't condemn it until we've tried it," said Gabriel thoughtfully, and he went on after a moment:
"The terrible thing for us about the negroes is that they are so grave a responsibility—so grave a responsibility. Of course, we aren't to blame—we didn't bring them here; and yet I sometimes feel as if we had really done so."
This was a point of view which Cyrus had never considered, and he felt an immediate suspicion of it. It looked, somehow, as if it were insidiously leading the way to an appeal for money.
"It's the best thing that could have happened to them," he replied shortly. "If they'd remained in Africa, they'd never have been civilized or—or Christianized."
"Ah, that is just where the responsibility rests on us. We stand for civilization to them; we stand even—or at least we used to stand—for Christianity. They haven't learned yet to look above or beyond us, and the example we set them is one that they are condemned, for sheer lack of any finer vision, to follow. The majority of them are still hardly more than uneducated children, and that very fact makes an appeal to one's compassion which becomes at times almost unbearable."