I must confess that I prefer the Liberal who is personally affected, who is willing to send his own children to a mixed school as proof of his faith. I leave out of account the question of the best interests of the children, the question of what their best interests really are. I'm talking about the grand manner of the Liberal -- North and South -- who is not affected personally. If these people were denied a voice (do they have a moral right to a voice?) , what voices would be left? Who is involved willy nilly? Well, after everybody has followed the New England pattern of segregating one's children into private schools, only the poor folks are left. And it is precisely in this poorer economic class that one finds, and has always found, the most racial friction.

A dear, respected friend of mine, who like myself grew up in the South and has spent many years in New England, said to me not long ago: ``I cann't forgive New England for rejecting all complicity.'' Being a teacher of American literature, I remembered Whittier's ``Massachusetts to Virginia,'' where he said: ``But that one dark loathsome burden ye must stagger with alone, And reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown.'' There is a legend (Hawthorne records it in his ``English Notebooks.'' and one finds it again in Thomas Nelson Page) to the effect that the Mayflower on its second voyage brought a cargo of Negro slaves. Whether historically a fact or not, the legend has a certain symbolic value.