He recalled the fact that there were more negroes in the United States than inhabitants in Mexico, the third republic of the world.
Amalgamation simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, fiat nose, massive jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair will register their animal marks over the proudest intellect and the rarest beauty of any other race. The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood makes a negro.
What could be the outcome of it? What was his duty as a citizen and a member of civilised society? Since the scenes through which he had passed with Tom Camp and that mob the question was insistent and personal. It clouded his soul and weighed on him like the horrors of a nightmare.
Again and again the fateful words the Preacher had dinned into his ears since childhood pressed upon him, “You can not build in a Democracy a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. The future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto.”
His depression and brooding over the fearful events in which he had so recently taken part had tinged his life and all its hopes with sadness. He had reflected this in his letters to Sallie Worth without even mentioning the events. His heart was full of sickening foreboding. How could one love and be happy in a world haunted by such horrors! He had begged her to hasten her hour of final decision. He told her of his sense of loneliness and isolation, and of his inexpressible need of her love and presence in his daily life.
Her answer had only intensified his moody feelings. She had written that her love grew stronger every day and his love more and more became necessary to her life, and yet she could not cloud its future with the anger of her father and the broken heart of her mother by an elopement. She feared such a shock would be fatal and all her life would be embittered by it. They must wait. She was using all her skill to win her father, but as yet without success. But she determined to win him, and it would be so.
All this seemed so far away and shadowy to Gaston’s eager restless soul.
The letter had closed by saying she was preparing for another trip to Boston to visit Helen Lowell and that she should be absent at least a month. She asked that his next letter be addressed to Boston.
Somehow Boston seemed just then out of the world on another planet, it was so far away and its people and their life so unreal to his imagination.
But he sighed and turned resolutely to his work of preparation for an event in his life which he, meant to make great in the history of the state. It was the meeting of the Democratic convention, as yet nearly two years in the future. He held a subordinate position in his party’s councils, but defeat and ruin had taken the conceit out of the old line leaders and he knew that his day was drawing near.