"
"Bless me! your great-grandmother, eh? Come, now, what do you call
yourself,--an Injun?"
"No, I don't. I call myself an Anglo-Saxon."
"What, not call yourself an Injun,--when your great-grandmother was one?
Here's a pretty go!"
"Nonsense! 'tisn't likely that filtered Indian blood can take precedence
and mastery of all the Anglo-Saxon material it's run through since
then."
"Hurray! now you've said it. Lookee here, Captain. You say the
Anglo-Saxon's the master race of the world."
"Of course I do."
"Of course you do,--being a sensible fellow. So do I; and you say the
negro blood is mighty poor stuff, and the race a long way behind ours."
"Of course, again."
"Now, Captain, just take a sober squint at your own logic. You back
Anglo-Saxon against the field; very well! here's Miss Ercildoune, we'll
say, one eighth negro, seven eighths Anglo-Saxon. You make that one
eighth stronger than all the other seven eighths: you make that little
bit of negro master of all the lot of Anglo-Saxon. Now I have such a
good opinion of my own race that if it were t'other way about, I'd think
the one eighth Saxon strong enough to beat the seven eighths nigger.
That's sound, isn't it? consequently, I call anybody that's got any
mixture at all, and that knows anything, and keeps a clean face,--and
ain't a rebel, nor yet a Copperhead,--I call him, if it's a him, and
her, if it's a she, one of us.
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