Complicity is an embarrassing word. It is something which most of us try to get out from under. Like the cowboy in Stephen Crane's ``Blue Hotel,'' we run around crying, ``Well, I didn't do anything, did I?'' Robert Penn Warren puts it this way in ``Brother to Dragons'': ``The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence,'' where innocence, I think, means about the same thing as redemption. A man must be able to say, ``Father, I have sinned,'' or there is no hope for him. Lincoln understood this better than most when he said in his ``Second Inaugural'' that God ``gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.'' He also spoke of ``the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years in unrequited toil.'' Lincoln was historian and economist enough to know that a substantial portion of this wealth had accumulated in the hands of the descendants of New Englanders engaged in the slave trade. After how many generations is such wealth (mounting all the while through the manipulations of high finance) purified of taint? It is a question which New Englanders long ago put out of their minds. But didn't they get off too easy? The slaves never shared in their profits, while they did share, in a very real sense, in the profits of the slave owners: they were fed, clothed, doctored, and so forth; they were the beneficiaries of responsible, paternalistic care.