It was the dream of his life to have money enough to buy back his mother’s old home, beautify it, and live there in comfort with a great library of books he would gather. The possibility of a career at the state Capital and then at Washington for so young a man was one of dazzling splendour to his youthful mind. For the moment it seemed almost impossible to say no. McLeod saw his hesitation and already smiled with the certainty of triumph. A cloud overspread his face when Gaston at length said, “I ’ll give you my answer to-morrow.” “All right, you’re a gentleman. I can trust you. Our conversation is of course only between you and me.” “Certainly, I understand that.” All that day and night he was alone fighting out the battle in his soul. It was an easy solution of life that opened before him. The attainment of his proudest ambitions lay within his grasp almost without a struggle. Such a campaign, with his name on the lips of surging thousands around those speaker’s stands, was an idea that fascinated him with a serpent charm. All that he had to do was to give up his prejudices on the Negro question. His own party stood for no principle except the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon. On the issue of the party platforms, he was in accord with the modern Republican utterances at almost every issue, and so were his associates in the Southern Democracy. The Negro was the point. What was the use now of persisting in the stupid reiteration of the old slogan of white supremacy? The Negro had the ballot. He was still the ward of the nation, and likely to be for all time, so far as he could see. The Negro was the one pet superstition of the millions who lived where no negro dwelt. His person and his ballot were held more peculiarly sacred and inviolate in the South than that of any white man elsewhere. The possibility of a reunion in friendly understanding and sympathy between the masses of the North and the masses of the South seemed remote and impossible in his day and generation. He asked himself the question, could such a revolution toward universal suffrage ever go backward, no matter how base the motive which gave it birth? Why not give up impracticable dreams, accept things as they are, and succeed? He did not confer with the Rev. John Durham on this question, because he knew what his answer would be without asking. A thousand times he had said to him, with the emphasis he could give to words, “_My boy, the future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto! We are now deciding which it shall be. The future of the world depends on the future of this Republic. This Republic can have no future if racial lines are broken, and its proud citizenship sinks to the level of a mongrel breed of Mulattoes. The South must tight this battle to a finish. Two thousand years look down upon the struggle, and Two thousand years of the future bend low to catch the message of life or death!_”