with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid genius
of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven in
his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvan cherished
a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with the feeling
of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor, with the
knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishman and a
Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to that
progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love of woman: He
loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too was a worker, a
champion worker. He doated on the prospect of plunging into his work; the
vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, and there could be
no peace without his prize.

He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steady
motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less
than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the golden
light came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused some
of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched the
scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities,
easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. These
numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time,
as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into
bondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: they have
it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of their
brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They will
have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the
leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the
spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice
of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our
column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'
arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which
will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of
yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee for
the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he
apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right,
thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the
great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And