CHAPTER II—THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER
McLEOD was waiting with some impatience in his room at the hotel.
“Walk in Gaston, you’re a little late. However, better late than never.” McLeod plunged directly into the purpose of his visit.
“Gaston you’re a man of brains, and oratorical genius. I heard your speech in the last Democratic convention in Raleigh, and I don’t say it to flatter you, that was the greatest speech made in any assembly in this state since the war.”
“Thanks!” said Gaston with a wave of his arm.
“I mean it. You know too much to be in sympathy with the old moss-backs who are now running this state. For fourteen years, the South has marched to the polls and struck blindly at the Republican party, and three times it struck to kill. The Southern people have nothing in common with these Northern Democrats who make your platforms and nominate your candidate. You don’t ask anything about the platform or the man. You would vote for the devil if the Democrats nominated him, and ask no questions; and what infuriates me is you vote to enforce platforms that mean economic ruin to the South.”
“Man shall not live by bread alone, McLeod.”
“Sure, but he can’t live on dead men’s bones. You vote in solid mass on the Negro question, which you settled by the power of Anglo-Saxon insolence when you destroyed the Reconstruction governments at a blow. Why should you keep on voting against every interest of the South, merely because you hate the name Republican?”
“Why? Simply because so long as the Negro is here with a ballot in his hands he is a menace to civilisation. The Republican party placed him here. The name Republican will stink in the South for a century, not because they beat us in war, but because two years after the war, in profound peace, they inaugurated a second war on the unarmed people of the South, butchering the starving, the wounded, the women and children. God in heaven, will I ever forget that day they murdered my mother! Their attempt to establish with the bayonet an African barbarism on the ruins of Southern society was a conspiracy against human progress. It was the blackest crime of the nineteenth century.”
“You are talking in a dead language. We are living in a new world.”