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To be able really to know, truly to
understand and come human-close to the lowly, to men and women under
the bondage of age-old prejudice, or outcast by the color of their
skin, is a terrible and perilous gift. This is the much knowledge in
which there is much grief.
Peter Champneys saw both sides. He saw and heard and knew things
that would have made his mother turn in her grave had she known. He
knew what depths of savagery and superstition, of brute sloth and
ignorance, lay here to drive back many a would-be white helper in
despair, and to render the labor of many a splendid negro reformer
all but futile. But he knew, too, the terrible patience, the
incredible resignation, with which poverty and neglect and hunger
and oppression and injustice are borne, until at times, child as he
was, his soul sickened with shame and rage. He relished the sweet
earthy humor that brightens humble lives, the gaiety and charity
under conditions which, when white men have to bear them, go to the
making of red terrorists.


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