"Humph!" said Stangrave with a smile. "Who so cruel at times as your too benevolent philanthropist? Did you ever count the meaning of those words? Disruption of the Union, an invasion of the South by the North; and an internecine war, aggravated by the horrors of a general rising of the slaves, and such scenes as Hayti beheld sixty years ago. If you have ever read them, you will pause ere you determine to repeat them on a vaster scale." "It is dreadful, Heaven knows, even in thought! But, Stangrave, can any moderation on your part ward it off? Where there is crime, there is vengeance; and without shedding of blood is no remission of sin." "God knows! It may be true: but God forbid that I should ever do aught to hasten what may come. Oh, Claude, do you fancy that I, of all men, do not feel at moments the thirst for brute vengeance?" Claude was silent. "Judge for yourself, you who know all--what man among us Northerners can feel, as I do, what those hapless men may have deserved?--I who have day and night before me the brand of their cruelty, filling my heart with fire? I need all my strength, all my reason, at times to say to myself, as I say to others--'Are not these slaveholders men of like passions with yourself? What have they done which you would not have done in their place?' I have never read that key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. I will not even read this Dred, admirable as I believe it to be." "Why should you?" said Claude. "Have you not a key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, more pathetic than any word of man's or woman's?" "But I do not mean that! I will not read them, because I have the key to them in my own heart, Claude: because conscience has taught me to feel for the Southerner as a brother, who is but what I might have been; and to sigh over his misdirected courage and energy, not with hatred, not with contempt: but with pity, all the more intense the more he scorns that pity; to long, not merely for the slaves' sake, but for the masters' sake, to see them--the once chivalrous gentlemen of the South--delivered from the meshes of a net which they did not spread for themselves, but which was round their feet, and round their fathers', from the day that they were born. You ask me to destroy these men. I long to save them from their certain doom!" "You are right, and a better Christian than I am, I believe. Certainly they do need pity, if any sinners do; for slavery seems to be--to judge from Mr. Brooks's triumph--a great moral curse, and a heavier degradation to the slaveholder himself, than it can ever be to the slave."