What would be hardship and distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool matter of course in another one.

My father's dividing line was that of color.

_Among his equals_, never was a man more just and generous; but he considered the negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis.

I suppose, to be sure, if anybody had asked him, plump and fair, whether they had human immortal souls, he might have hemmed and hawed, and said yes.

But my father was not a man much troubled with spiritualism; religious sentiment he had none, beyond a veneration for God, as decidedly the head of the upper classes.
"Well, my father worked some five hundred negroes; he was an inflexible, driving, punctilious business man; everything was to move by system,--to be sustained with unfailing accuracy and precision.