The battle against Middle Age slavery was fought by the old Catholic Church, which held the Jewish notion, and looked on the Deity as the actual King of Christendom, and every man in 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 nation’s attitude, is that of the Jews rebuilding their ruined walls,—­the tool in one hand, and the sword in the other; for the wild Arabs are close outside, and the time is short, and the storm has only lulled awhile in mercy, that wise men may prepare for the next thunder-burst?  It is an ugly fact: