But now, those words of Thurnall’s, backed by far bitterer ones of Marie’s, were fretting Stangrave’s heart.—­What if they were true?  They were not the whole truth.  There was beside, and above them all, a nobleness in the American heart, which could, if it chose, and when it chose, give the lie to that bitter taunt:  but had it done so already?

At least he himself had not....  If Thurnall and Marie were unjust to his nation, they had not been unjust to him.  He, at least, had been making, all his life, mere outward blessings causes of self-congratulation, and not of humility.  He had been priding himself on wealth, ease, luxury, cultivation, without a thought that these were God’s gifts, and that God would require an account of them.  If Thurnall were right, was he himself too truly the typical American?  And bitterly enough he accused at once himself and his people.

“Noble?  Marie is right!  We boast of our nobleness:  better to take the only opportunity of showing it which we have had since we have become a nation!  Heaped with every blessing which God could give; beyond the reach of sorrow, a check, even an interference; shut out from all the world in God’s new Eden, that we might freely eat of all the trees of the garden, and grow and spread, and enjoy ourselves like the birds of heaven—­God only laid on us one duty, one command, to right one simple, confessed, conscious wrong....

“And what have we done?—­what have even I done?  We have steadily, deliberately cringed at the feet of the wrong-doer, even while we boasted our superiority to him at every point, and at last, for the sake of our own selfish ease, helped him to forge new chains for his victims, and received as our only reward fresh insults.  White slaves!  We, perhaps, and not the English peasant, are the white slaves!  At least, if the Irishman emigrates to England, or the Englishman to Canada, he is not hunted out with blood-hounds, and delivered back to his landlord to be scourged and chained.  He is not practically out of the pale of law, unrepresented, forbidden even the use of books; and even if he were, there is an excuse for the old country; for she was founded on no political principles, but discovered what she knows step by step, a sort of political Topsy, as Claude Mellot calls her, who has ‘kinder growed,’ doing from hand to mouth what seemed best.  But that we, who profess to start as an ideal nation, on fixed ideas of justice, freedom, and equality—­that we should have been stultifying ever since every great principle of which we so loudly boast!—­”

* * * * *

“The old Jew used to say of his nation, ’It is God that hath made us, and not we ourselves.’  We say, ’It is we that have made ourselves, while God—?’—­Ah, yes; I recollect.  God’s work is to save a soul here and a soul there, and to leave America to be saved by the Americans who made it.  We must have a broader and deeper creed than that if we are to work out our destiny.