"Rasey has lost Syphax, and Syphax has found him," said the Doctor, dryly.
"You do not understand. You see in the rupture of these ties only a loss of service to the master. We feel it to be something more."
"The human heart is framed sensible to kindness; that you should have an attachment for the man who devotes his life to yours without return has nothing miraculous for me. I can believe that even Rasey is capable of feeling the loss of what has been useful to him."
"No, you do not understand the relation between us and this affectionate subject race."
"Frankly, I do not. I cannot enter into it on either side. If I were even as full of the milk of human kindness as we are bound to suppose these soft-tempered foreigners to be, it seems to me I should still like to choose my beneficiaries; and, in your place, I should have quite another taste in benefactors. When I indue myself in imagination with a black skin, and try to think and feel conformably, I find my innate narrowness too much for me; I cannot disguise from myself that I should prefer to lavish my benefits on my own flesh and blood. Resuming my personality, I can as little divest myself in fancy of my pride of race. If I must accept a state of dependence, I would take the bounty of a white man, hard and scanty though it might be, rather than receive luxurious daily bread at the hands of blacks."
"Borrow, you always had the knack of making a fellow feel uncomfortable. I would rather talk with Dudley than with you. I do not see that you are any better friend to our institutions than he is."
"A friend to slavery? Distrust the man not born and bred to it who calls himself one!
"I suppose I am as much of a pro-slavery man as you will easily find in New England,—for an unambitious, private man, I mean. Slavery does not mean for me power or place. What does slavery mean for me when I oppose its opponents? It means you, Westlake, my old schoolmate,—you and your wife and children. It means Harvey and his wife and children. I have the weakness to care more for you than for your slaves. I cannot resolve to see you deprived of comforts and luxuries that use has made necessary to you, that they may rise to wants they have no sense of as yet. As to your duties to your humble neighbors, and the way you fulfil them, that account is kept between you and your Maker. He has not made me a judge or a ruler over you."
Westlake's deep red deepened. "I leave religious matters to those whose charge it is. I have been instructed to hold the place which has been awarded me, without asking why I have been made to differ from others. And the teaching which is good enough for me is, I suppose, good enough for my servants. As for the rest, we know that our people are as well off as the same class in any part of the world, not excepting New England."
"I dare say such a class would be no better off there than here. But come and learn for yourself how it is there."