Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/223

 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