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. He felt that it wuz useless to graft a pomegranate or a banana bush onto the North Pole. He felt that it wouldn’t do the pole any good, and the grafts would freeze up and drop off—why, they would have to, they couldn’t help it, and the pole couldn’t help it either—the pole had to be froze, it wuz made so. So he never had favored the colonization of his race in the colder Western States. Nor had he quite liked the idee of their findin’ a new home in the far South or in South America. They would be still in an alien land, alien races would press clost aginst ’em. No, a home in Africa pleased him best—in that land the Lord had placed the black people—it wuz their home accordin’ to all the laws of God and man. And if it hadn’t been the best place for ’em, if they hadn’t been fitted by nater for that climate, why he reasoned it out that they wouldn’t have been born there in the first place.