He asked himself that very question, a moment after, angrily; for he was out of humour with himself, with his country, and indeed with the universe in general.  And across his mind flashed a memorable conversation at Constantinople long since, during which he had made some such unwise remark to Thurnall, and received from him a sharp answer, which parted them for years.

It was natural enough that that conversation should come back to him just then; for, in his jealousy, he was thinking of Tom Thurnall often enough every day; and in spite of his enmity, he could not help suspecting more and more that Thurnall had had some right on his side of the quarrel.

He had been twitting Thurnall with the miserable condition of the labourers in the south of England, and extolling his own country at the expense of ours.  Tom, unable to deny the fact, had waxed all the more wroth at having it pressed on him; and at last had burst forth—­

“Well, and what right have you to crow over us on that score?  I suppose, if you could hire a man in America for eighteen-pence a day instead of a dollar and a half, you would do it?  You Americans are not accustomed to give more for a thing than it’s worth in the market, are you?”

“But,” Stangrave had answered, “the glory of America is, that you cannot get the man for less than the dollar and a half; that he is too well fed, too prosperous, too well educated, to be made a slave of.”

“And therefore makes slaves of the niggers instead?  I’ll tell you what, I’m sick of that shallow fallacy—­the glory of America!  Do you mean by America, the country, or the people?  You boast, all of you, of your country, as if you had made it yourselves; and quite forget that God made America, and America has made you.”

“Made us, sir?” quoth Stangrave fiercely enough.

“Made you!” replied Thurnall, exaggerating his half truth from anger.  “To what is your comfort, your high feeding, your very education, owing, but to your having a thin population, a virgin soil, and unlimited means of emigration?  What credit to you if you need no poor laws, when you pack off your children, as fast as they grow up, to clear more ground westward?  What credit to your yeomen that they have read more books than our clods have, while they can earn more in four hours than our poor fellows in twelve?  It all depends on the mere physical fact of your being in a new country, and we in an old one:  and as for moral superiority, I shan’t believe in that while I see the whole of the northern states so utterly given up to the ‘almighty dollar,’ that they leave the honour of their country to be made ducks and drakes of by a few southern slaveholders.  Moral superiority?  We hold in England that an honest man is a match for three rogues.  If the same law holds good in the United States, I leave you to settle whether Northerners or Southerners are the honester men.”

Whereupon (and no shame to Stangrave) there was a heavy quarrel, and the two men had not met since.