The young men looked with amazement at a scar some three or four inches long on her forearm.
"If he would do that to his wife, what treatment could you expect for his niggers?" Bim asked. "There are many Biggses in the South."
"What so vile as a cheap, rococo aristocracy—growing up in idleness, too noble to be restrained, with every brutal passion broad blown as flush as May?" Kelso growled.
"Nothing is long sacred in the view of any aristocracy—not even God," Abe answered. "They make a child's plaything of Him and soon cast Him aside."
"But I hold that if our young men are to be trained to tyranny in a lot of little nigger kingdoms, our Democracy will die."
Abe made no answer. He was always slow to commit himself.
"The North is partly to blame for what has come," said Samson. "I guess our Yankee captains brought over most of the niggers and sold them to the planters of the South."
"There was a demand for them, or those Yankee pirates wouldn't have brought the niggers," Harry answered. "Both seller and buyer were committing a crime."
"They established a great wrong and now the South is pushing to extend and give it the sanction of law," said Abe. "There is the point of irritation and danger."
"I hear that in the next Legislature an effort will be made to endorse slavery," said Kelso. "It would be like endorsing Nero and Caligula."