ence. Everywhere men's faces were
twitching with repressed fury. Some were livid, and others bit their
lips to keep back the hot words that clamoured for utterance. The
chairman made no attempt to rise, but by a subconscious unanimity of
thought every eye was turned to the one man whose appearance had
undergone no change. As if he had been listening to the legal
presentation of an impersonal case, Gerard Van Derwater leaned back in
his chair with the same courtly detachment he had shown from the
beginning of the affair.

II.

'Mr. Van Derwater,' said the chairman hoarsely; and a murmur indicated
that he had voiced the wish of the gathering.

Slowly, almost ponderously, the diplomat rose, bowing to the chairman and
then to Watson, who was looking straight ahead, his face flushed crimson.

'Mr. Chairman--Mr. Watson--Gentlemen,' said Van Derwater. He stroked his
chin meditatively, and looked calmly about as though leisurely recalling
a titbit of anecdote or quotation. 'Our friend from overseas has not
erred on the side of subterfuge. He has been frank--excellently frank.
He has told us that this Republic has become a jest, and that we are
responsible. I assume from several of your faces that you are not
pleased with the truth. Surely you did not need Mr. Watson to tell you
what they are saying in England and France. That has been
obvious--unpleasantly obvious--and, I suppose, obviously unpleasant.'

He smiled with a little touch of irony, and leaning forward, flicked the
ash from his cigar on to a plate.

'Mr. Watson,' he resumed, 'has asked what we have done with America's
soul. That is a telling phrase, and I should like to meet it with an
equally telling one; but this is not a matter of phraseology, but of the
deepest thought. Gentlemen, if you will, look back with me over the
brief history of this Republic. There are great truths hidden in the
Past.

'In 1778 Monsieur Turgot wrote that America was the hope of the human
race--that the earth could see consolation in the thought of the asylum
at last open to the down-trodden of all nations. Three years later the
Abbe Taynals, writing of the American Revolution, said: "At the sound of
the snapping chains our own fetters seem to grow lighter, and we imagine
for a moment that the air we breathe grows purer at the news that the
universe counts some tyrants the less." Ten years after that the editor
Prudhomme declared: "Philosophy and America have brou