I'll get it for you. You go right ahead and give it to him, Mr.

Barrow. He's the new boarder--Mr. Tracy--and I'd just got to where it

was getting too deep for me."

"Much obliged if you will, Hattie. I was coming to borrow of the boys."

He sat down at his ease on an old trunk, and said, "I've been listening

and got interested; and as I was saying, I wouldn't go on, if I were you.

You see where you are coming to, don't you? Calling yourself a lady

doesn't elect you; that is what you were going to say; and you saw that

if you said it you were going to run right up against another difference

that you hadn't thought of: to-wit, Whose right is it to do the electing?

Over there, twenty thousand people in a million elect themselves

gentlemen and ladies, and the nine hundred and eighty thousand accept

that decree and swallow the affront which it puts upon them. Why, if

they didn't accept it, it wouldn't be an election, it would be a dead

letter and have no force at all. Over here the twenty thousand would-be

exclusives come up to the polls and vote themselves to be ladies and

gentlemen. But the thing doesn't stop there. The nine hundred and

eighty thousand come and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen too,

and that elects the whole nation. Since the whole million vote

themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that

election. It does make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about

it; while over yonder the inequality, (by decree of the infinitely

feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute--as real

and absolute as our equality."

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The American Claimant