Says I, “Think how those bloody warfares are powerful for all sorts of evils and crimes; how they turn human beins into wild beasts of prey; think how humanity, and mercy, and purity and all goodness are trod down under the feet of the great armys; and how the more ghastly army of pestilence, and disease, and crime, and want, foller on after them—a phantom host shadderin’ the land for years, mightier for evil than the army they foller. Why Ulysses, I couldn’t begin to tell all the horrers and evils of war, not if I should stand here and talk to you till the year 1900; for it can’t be told not by mortal tongue. It is a language writ in broken hearts, and despair, and want, and agony, and madness, and crime, and death, and it takes them to read it.”
Ulysses haint much of a talker, but he took his cigar out of his mouth, and says he mildly: “How will Nations settle their difficulties then?”
“Why,” says I, “leave it out to some good man to decide upon. Let ’em have a honorable-minded Peace Commissioner. Why,” says I, “if it wasn’t for havin’ everything else under the sun on my hands, I would be one myself, and not charge a cent for my trouble.”
The Nation, (through Ulysses) seemed to take my advice first-rate; he stood it like a major, and sot peacefully and smoked that cigar in as friendly and meditatin’ a way as I ever see one smoked, and he said I spoke his mind about the Peace Commissioners. And then I spoke up and says I:
“Ulysses, I must also speak to you about Lo.”
“Lo who?” says he.
“Why,” says I, “Lo, the poor Injun.”
The minute I said Injun, he give a kind of a groan, and begun to look as fractious and worrysome as I ever see Josiah look, and says he:
“Darn Lo, anyway.”
“Well,” says I, “when I look round here, and see how nobly Uncle Sam has stood up and spread himself out here, see what wonders of glory and enchantment he has wrought for his own race, it don’t seem to me that I can bear to see him a settin’ down on the Injun race, a tryin’ to choke ’em to death. Samuel never took a posture that I hated to see worse than that posture. It haint Christian nor even dignified.”