onquer? Does right prevail? You can
say. I ask you, who have the answer in your power. Does right prevail?
Then give my stricken people what is theirs. Does justice conquer?
Then see that they come to no harm.

"I dare to put this thing raw to your face because I know the man that
once lived within you. I saw you--!"

"Don't harp on that," Stanton cut in viciously. "You know nothing
about it."

"I _do_ harp on that. I have come here to harp on that. Do you think
that if I had not with my eyes seen that thing I would have come near
you at all? No. I would have branded you before all men for the thing
that you have done. I would have given these confessions which I hold
to the world. I would have denounced you as far as tongue and pen
would go to every man who through four years gave blood at your side.
I would have braved the rebuke of my superiors and maybe the
discipline of my Church to bring upon you the hard thoughts of men. I
would have made your name hated in the ears of little children. But I
would not have come to you.

"If I had not seen that thing I would not have come to you, for I
would have said: What good? The man is a coward without a heart. A
_coward_, do you remember that word?"

The man groaned and struck out with his hand as though to drive away a
ghastly thing that would leap upon him.

"A coward without a heart," the Bishop repeated remorselessly, "who
has men and women and children in his power and who, because he has no
heart, can use his power to crush them.

"If I had not seen, I would have said that.

"But I saw. I _saw_. And I have come here to ask you: Are you the same
brave man with a heart that I saw on that day?

"You shall not evade me. Do you think you can put me off with defences
and puling arguments of necessity, or policy, or the sacredness of
property? No. You and I are here looking at naked truth. I will go
down into your very soul and have it out by the roots, the naked
truth. But I will have my answer. Are you that same man?

"If you are not that same man; if you have killed that in you which
gave life to that man; if that man no longer lives in you; if you are
not capable of being that same man with the heart of a great and
tender hero, then tell me and I will go. But you shall answer me. I
will have my answer."

Clifford Stanton rose heavily from his chair and stood trembling as
though in an overpowering rage, and visibly struggling for his command
of mind and tong