“Let the Southerners act as I do, and the niggers act like Ury, and that would end up the Race Problem pretty sudden.”
Sez I, in pretty lofty axents, for I begun to feel eloquent and by the side of myself, “How many generations has it took to make you honest and considerate, and Ury faithful and patient? How long has it took, Josiah Allen?”
“Why, about seven years or thereabouts. He come in the middle of winter, and now it is spring.”
Sez I, “It has took hundreds and hundreds of years, Josiah Allen.”
And I went on more noble and deep:
“Ury’s parents and grandparents, and back as fur as he knows, wuz good, hard-workin’, honest men—so wuz yours. You are both the children of freedom and liberty. You haven’t been saddled with a burden of ignorance and moral and physical helplessness and want. He has no lurid background of abuse and wrongs and arrogance to inflame his fevered fancies.
“You might as well say that you could gather as good grain down in your old swamp that has never been tilled sence the memory of man, as you can in your best wheat field, that has been ploughed, and harrowed, and enriched for year after year.
“The old swamp can be made to yield good grain, Josiah Allen, but it has got to be burned over, and drained, and ploughed, and sown with good grain.
“There is a Hand that is able to do this, Josiah Allen. And,” sez I, lookin’ off some distance beyend him and Jonesville, “there is a Hand that I believe is a dealin’ with that precious soil in which saints and heroes are made, and where the beauteous flower of freedom blows out.
“Has not the South been ploughed with the deep plough of God’s purpose—burned with the lightnin’ of His own meanin’, enriched with the blood of martyrs and heroes? Has not the cries of His afflicted ones rose to the heavens while onbeknown to ’em the chariot of Freedom wuz marchin’ down towards the Red Sea, to go ahead on ’em through the dretful sea of bloodshed and tribulations, while the black clouds of battle riz up and hid the armies of Slavery and Freedom, hid the oppressors and the oppressed?