n it as God's
own child. I see now!--No wonder that the battle in America has as yet
been fought by the Quakers, who believe that there is a divine light and
voice in every man; while the Calvinist preachers, with their isolating
and individualising creed, have looked on with folded hands, content to
save a negro's soul here and there, whatsoever might become of the
bodies and the national future of the whole negro race. No wonder, while
such men have the teaching of the people, that it is necessary still in
the nineteenth century, in a Protestant country, amid sane human beings,
for such a man as Mr. Sumner to rebut, in sober earnest, the argument
that the negro was the descendant of Canaan, doomed to eternal slavery
by Noah's curse!"

* * * * *

He would rouse himself. He would act, speak, write, as many a noble
fellow-countryman was doing. He had avoided them of old as bores and
fanatics who would needs wake him from his luxurious dreams. He had even
hated them, simply because they were more righteous than he. He would be
a new man henceforth.

He strode down the hill through the cannon-guarded vineyards, among the
busy groups of peasants.

"Yes, Marie was right. Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to
labour in danger and in dread; to do a little good ere the night comes,
when no man can work: instead of trying to realise for oneself a
Paradise; not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's
Casino-paradise; and perhaps least of all, because most selfish and
isolated of all, my own heart-paradise--the apotheosis of loafing, as
Claude calls it. Ah, Tennyson's Palace of Art is a true word--too true,
too true!

"Art? What if the most necessary human art, next to the art of
agriculture, be, after all, the art of war? It has been so in all ages.
What if I have been befooled--what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been
befooled by forty years of peace? We have forgotten that the history of
the world has been as yet written in blood; that the story of the human
race is the story of its heroes and its martyrs--the slayers and the
slain. Is it not becoming such once more in Europe now? And what divine
exemption can we claim from the law? What right have we to suppose that
it will be aught else, as long as there are wrongs unredressed on earth;
as long as anger and ambition, cupidity and wounded pride, canker the
hearts of men? What if the wise man's attitude, and the wise na