He flushed a little. “I know what you mean,” he answered tenderly, “and if there were no more in this matter than the mere question of having or not having slaves I would willingly free all that I own--ask Emily to divide the property and give their freedom to all the niggers that might fall to my share--for your sake, Rhoda, dear, for the sake of making you my wife. But the South needs slave labor--has got to have it in order to be prosperous--and I would be as untrue to my duty to my state and to my section if I were to do that as you think you would be to your conscience if you were to accept slavery.” She followed quickly upon his last word: “There can be no need of property or prosperity, as you call it, equal to the need, the right, of every human being to his freedom. When you make your comfort and wealth,--I mean all of you in the South,--of more importance than that first human right you are outraging one of God’s laws, and God’s curse will yet fall heavily upon you because of it.” “You speak in that way, Rhoda, because--pardon me--you really know nothing about economic conditions in the South. You are merely repeating the words of these abolition fanatics at the North, where the industrial conditions are such that slave labor would not be profitable. If it were, there’d be a different tune sung north of Mason and Dixon’s line!” She shook her head at him. “You say that because you don’t understand the feeling that is at the bottom of the anti-slavery movement. It places human rights above business profits.” “As to that, we of the South have our human rights and civil rights, too. We are trying to keep faith and you of the North are struggling to break it. You abolitionists forget the big share, the equal share, the southern states had in the making of this country, and you forget that they bore more than their share of the burden and loss of making it into a nation. There was more blood shed in South Carolina during the Revolution, Rhoda, than in Massachusetts, yes, more than in all New England. And now Massachusetts has the presumption, the insolence, to try to dictate to us how we shall order our affairs! We let her alone to work out her own destiny, and we demand the same right!” “But we northerners see farther and see clearer into the way things are going than you can, because your eyes are blinded by what you believe to be your present interests. We want you to recognize the truth, that this nation was created to be a free country, that those who made it meant it to be the hope of the whole world, and it can never, never, be that as long as you of the South insist upon making it half slave.”