"What _do_ you mean?" asked Mrs. Gano, turning sharply on her son. "I mean that if our forefathers had realized what an awful inheritance they were laying up for their children in the negro problem, they would have gone without their valets and left the negro in his native wilds." "Oh, if you only mean that the initial mistake was in having the shiftless creatures here at all, I agree. The negro enslaved was a care and a drag on the South; the negro free is a menace to all America." She opened the door of the long room and rang for Venus to take off her shoes. "Yes, the Color Question," said John Gano, sitting down heavily on one of the fleur-de-lis chairs--"the Color Question is just one of the forms of ferociously usurious interest one generation has to pay on the debts incurred by another. The world learns its lessons with infinite pains. The same thing happens over and over again, and no one raises a finger." He sat gazing at some impending peril with prophetic gloom. "What is happening over again?" asked Ethan, divesting himself of his outer coat. "The importation of ignorant debased foreigners to do the work that the American born not only won't do himself, but won't, in his haste to get rich, allow to remain undone. Why do the offscourings of the earth flock to America? Not because it's any longer the New World. They don't go to Australia or South Africa in the same numbers. They come _here_ because the American born is more of an arrant fool and snob than any creature God permits to breathe. Hardly any one so poor but he will pay the highest wages for the worst alien service." "Father!" Val, half-way up-stairs, came running back to her country's rescue. "Cousin Ethan won't understand you are just arguing. Father doesn't really think Americans are snobs." "Yes, snobs of the worst kind! What respect have we for the laboring man? What do we know or practise of healthy German industry, of the thrift of the French?" "I thought our industries were our strong point." "Industries, yes--not our industry. We can establish mills and manufactories, and then get ship-loads of Teutons and of Irish to come over and work them." "If they'd only be content with that," said Ethan, "but they end by working our municipalities too and running our country." "They always do," said John Gano, shaking his forefinger in the air. "They always _have!_" With that he brought his clinched fist down on his knee. "If you can't hoe your row yourself, don't call in a man to help you. He'll end by helping himself. You'll have saved the hoeing and lost the row. But the average American won't do anything himself that he can get another man to do for him." No wonder, thought Ethan, that the foreign visitor to these shores has such difficulty in classifying American opinion. Here, under the same roof, within the bonds of the closet kinship, were to be heard the old views of "the dominant race" from Mrs. Gano, and here was her own son railing.