to say slipped out
of his consciousness completely, as he heard the Judge declare, "We deem
this, sir, a life and death struggle for our individual liberties; a
life and death struggle for our social order; a life and death struggle
for our continuance to exist as individuals." There was a long
repetition of the terms "life and death." They appealed to some tin-pan
rhythmic sense in the Judge's oratorical mind. But the phrase struck
fire in Grant Adams's heart. Life and death, life and death, rang
through his soul like a clamor of bells. "We have given our all,"
bellowed the Judge, "to make this Valley an industrial hive, where labor
may find employment--all of our savings, all of our heritage of
Anglo-Saxon organizing skill, and we view this life and death struggle
for its perpetuity--" But all Grant Adams heard of that sentence was
"life and death," as the great bell of his soul clanged its alarm. "We
are a happy, industrial family," intoned the Judge, the suave Judge, who
was something more than owner; who was Authority without responsibility,
who was the voice of the absentee master; the voice, it seemed to Grant,
of an enchanted peacock squawking in the garden of a dream; the voice
that cried: "and to him who would overthrow all this contentment, all
this admirable adjustment of industrial equilibrium we offer the life
and death alternative that is given to him who would violate a peaceful
home."

But all that Grant Adams sensed of his doom in the Judge's pronouncement
was the combat of death with life. Life and death were meeting for their
eternal struggle, and as the words resounded again and again in the
Judge's oratory, there rushed into Grant Adams's mind the phrase, "I am
the resurrection and the life," and he knew that in the life and death
struggle for progress, for justice, for a more abundant life on this
planet, it would be finally life and not death that would win.

As he sat blindly glaring at the floor, there may have stolen into his
being some ember from the strange flame burning about our earth, whose
touch makes men mad with the madness that men have, who come from the
wildernesses of life, from the lowly walks and waste places--the madness
of those who feed on locusts and wild honey; who, like St. Francis and
Savonarola, go forth on hopeless quests for the unattainable ideal, or
like John Brown, who burn in the scorching flame all the wisdom of the
schools and the courts, and for one glorious da