The answer was in Harry's firmest:--"His duty as a man. It was real, hearty kindness that he showed us. We owe him a great deal. I am not sure that we did not owe him our lives that dark night. I regard him as a friend." "Your other friends are flattered.--It is curious how these negrophiles betray themselves";--the Doctor had turned to me;--"they show that they think of the blacks just as we do, by their admiration when they meet one who shows signs of intelligence and good feeling." Ho looked at Harry, but in vain. "Here Harry, now, has been falling into transports all along the road." Harry kept his eyes on the table, but the Doctor was not to be balked. "Confess now, confess you have been surprised--and a good deal more surprised than I was--to find common sense and humanity in black men!" "No, not in black men. I have been surprised to find not only talent and judgment, but dignity and magnanimity, in _slaves_." "You must find the system not altogether a bad one which has developed such specimens of the human being,--out of such material, above all." "You must admit that the race is a strong and a high one which has not been utterly debased by such a system,--if it is to be called a system. I only wish our own race"---- "Showed an equal power of resistance?" "That was what I was going to say." "You might have said it. Yes,--the whites are the real sufferers." "I stopped because I remembered instances of men who have resisted nobly." "I am glad you can do justice to them. I thought you did not believe in humane slaveholders." "I was not thinking of them." "Ah! to be sure not! My friend Harvey, who entertained us so hospitably, is a bad man, I suppose?" "A mistaken man." "That is to be proved; he is trying to work out a difficult problem." "He is attempting an impossible compromise." "Compromise! Word of fear to the true New-Englander! Compromise? He is trying to reconcile his own comfort with that of his laborers, I suppose you mean." "He is trying to reconcile injustice with humanity." "See the stern old Puritan vein! I doubt whether his ancestor, the model of Massachusetts governors, ever carried a stiffer upper lip." And the Doctor surveyed Harry with a look from which he could not exclude a certain softening of affectionate admiration. "And he, a living exemplification of the persistence of race, is a stickler for the equality of all mankind! It is hard for one of that strict line to bend his views to circumstances," the Doctor went on, in a more indulgent tone. "Harry, my boy, you are in a new latitude. You must accept another standard. You cannot try things here by the weights and measures of the Puritans of the North. But who are your examples of resistance, though?" "The Puritans of the South. The men here who have but one standard,--that of right. The men here who are true to the principle which our country represents, and by which it is to live." "What principle?"