Why, you see when anybody is a tryin’ to do this, he hain’t a fightin’ aginst flesh and blood only, the real black and white flesh of the present, but he is a fightin’ aginst principalities and powers, the powers of the long kingdom of the past, the viewless but unfightable principalities of long centuries of concentrated opinions and hereditary influences, the ingrained contempt and scorn of the superior race towards the inferior in any other condition only servitude—the inbred feelin’s of slavery, of lookin’ up with a blended humility and hatred, admiration and envy, into the face of the dominant race. The race difference lays like a gulf between the two people. You can’t step over it, your legs hain’t long enough; you can’t bridge it over, there hain’t no boards to be found strong enough; there it yawns, a deep gulf, and always will between the two races. And when the Nation expected to jine these two forces and hitch ’em side by side to the car of freedom by a piece of paper with writin’ on it, expectin’ they would draw it along easy and stiddy, that wuz the time the Nation wuz a fool. It would be jest as reasonable to hitch a wild lion from the jungles by the side of a sheep, and set ’em to drawin’ the milk to the factory. They might expect that if the team got to the factory at all, the sheep would be inside of the lion, and the milk too. It won’t do no good to go too hard aginst Nater. She is one, Nater is, that can’t be went aginst not with any safety. Mebby after centuries of trainin’ and education, the lion might be learnt to trot along by the side of the sheep and dump the milk out all right at the factory door. But centuries after this had been done, the same instinctive race war would be a goin’ on between the black people and the white. You cannot make a soap-stun into a runnin’ vine, or a flat-iron blossom out with dewy roses, or a thistle bear pound sweet apples—it can’t be done, no matter how hard you work, or how pure your motives are. So these things bein’ settled and positive, Victor thought—and I’ll be hanged if I could blame him for thinkin’—that the sooner his people got into a place of their own, away from the white race that had fettered them, and they had fettered so long, the better it would be for them. He reasoned it out like this: “The Anglo-Saxons wuz here before we wuz, and they are a powerful nation of their own. They won’t go; so what remains but to take ourselves away, and the sooner the better,” he thought. He had read, as I said, many books on the subject; but of all the books he had read, Stanley’s description of some parts of Africa pleased him best. He shrank from takin’ his people into a colder climate; he had read long and elaborate arguments as to what cold wuz to do in changin’ and improvin’ the African. But his common sense taught him that the Lord knew better than the authors of these tracts as to what climate wuz best for His people.