“The negro is on a moral and intellectual plane so much lower than the white man,” met her eyes in another letter, “that it is evident he was designed by an all-wise God to be the white man’s servitor, just as are the other domestic animals. The Almighty meant the white man to use him for his own benefit in order that he might the more easily mount to higher spheres of cultivation and achievement. Between the races there is a natural relation, ordained by God himself when he created the black so much inferior to the white, and we are but carrying out His decrees when we embody that natural, heaven-declared superiority and inferiority into the legal relation of master and slave.” Presently her attention was attracted by farther development of the same theme in a more recent missive: “The idea that it is possible for the negro to profit by civilization, to advance or develop, is a monstrous delusion, held only by a few people at the North who know nothing about his real character. To attempt to force him into channels of life and into efforts for which he is by nature unfitted, as they are bent on doing, would be to turn the natural order of things topsy-turvy and bring destruction upon the whole nation. For a free Negrodom in the midst of our republic would swamp it in savagery.” Over the concluding page of the last letter she pored thoughtfully, stopping now and then to consider again the ideas it contained. For she could not deny to herself the seductive appeal of the aims it set forth, whatever she thought of the arguments upon which they were based. Interested though she was in these lines, she yet remembered to keep her hand over the bottom of the page. She knew what was there, but she knew too that if she hid it from eyes that would be drawn in that direction it would leap at her, when suddenly disclosed, with a fresh thrill of happiness.