Emerson -- Platonist, idealist, doctrinaire -- sounded a high Transcendental note in his ``Boston Hymn,'' delivered in 1863 in the Boston Music Hall amidst thundering applause: ``Pay ransom to the owner and fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him!'' It is the abstractionism, the unrealism, of the pure idealist. It ignores the sordid financial aspects (quite conveniently, too, for his audience, who could indulge in moral indignation without visible, or even conscious, discomfort, their money from the transaction having been put away long ago in a good antiseptic brokerage). Like Pilate, they had washed their hands. But can one, really? Can God be mocked, ever, in the long run?

New Englanders were a bit sensitive on the subject of their complicity in Negro slavery at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson explained in his ``Autobiography'': ``The clause reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.''

But that was a long time ago. The New England conscience became desensitized. George W. Cable (naturalized New Englander), writing in 1889 from ``Paradise Road, Northampton'' (lovely symbolic name), agitated continuously the ``Southern question.'' It was nice to be able to isolate it.