“Because we do know it!” hollered Josiah. “I know it is jest as I tell you, that that dumb nigger question can’t never touch us anyway. I’ve said it, and I’ll stick to it.”
But I still felt real eloquent, and I went right on and drew some metafors, as I most always do when I get to goin’, I can’t seem to help it.
Sez I, “The temperate man may say the liquor question will never affect him, but some day he gathers his sober children about him, and finds one is missin’—the pet of them all driven down in the street to death by a drunken driver.
“A Christian woman sez, ‘This question of Social Purity cannot affect me, for I am pure and come from a pure ancestry.’ But there comes a day when she finds the lamb of her flock overtaken and slain by this evil she thought could never touch her.
“The rich capitalist sets back in his luxurious chair and reads of the grim want that is howlin’ about the hovels of the poor laborers, the deaths by exposure and starvation. The graves of these starved victims seem fur off to him. They can never affect him, he thinks, so fur is he removed in his luxurious surroundin’s from all sights of woe and squalor.
“But even as he sets there thinkin’ this, in his curtained ease, a bullet aimed by the gaunt, frenzied hand of some starvin’ child of labor strikes his heart, and he finds in death the same level that the victims of want found by starvation.
“The mighty chain of humanity has drawn ’em on together, the high and the low, down to the equality of the grave.
“The hull chain of humanity is held in one hand anyway, and is beyend our control in its consequences.
“And how dast we to say with blind confidence that we know thus and so; that the evils that affect our brothers will not some time come to us; that the shadows that lay so heavy on their heads will not some time fall on us?”
“They hain’t our brothers,” hollered out Josiah in fearful axents. He wuzn’t melted down at all by my eloquent remarks; no, fur from it.