"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."