Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/205

 immoral, these creatures, and there is no use in trying to teach them, how to behave themselves decently," she went on, speaking somewhat bitterly. "I hardly know a family to which some woman of that low race has not brought misery and shame. They are utterly depraved. You sympathize with them; I tell you it is their victims who deserve our pity."

"Is the fault altogether theirs that they have come to this pass?" questioned Margaret. "How can people who for generations have had no idea of the sacredness of family life learn what it means in so few years? Suppose your father had been sold into one State, your mother and sisters and brothers into another,—don't you think that you might have rather misty ideas about domestic relations?"

"But that did n't happen outside of books, you know," answered Mrs. Harden. "Besides, they are perfectly untrustworthy—"

"And yet, Mrs. Harden, my uncle could, if he would, tell a very different story. During the war my father and himself and all the white men on the plantation were away from home righting for the lost cause, and the women of the family were left here alone unprotected, at the mercy of these 'untrustworthy' creatures, as you call them; and what did they do? Riot, steal, devastate, as white men would have done? No, they