The men stopped; the negro skulked nearer, his whole senses sharpened into hearing.  Dorr’s clear face was clouded.

“This slave question must be kept out of the war.  It puts a false face on it.”

“I thought one face was what it needed,” said Lamar.  “You have too many slogans.  Strong government, tariff, Sumter, a bit of bunting, eleven dollars a month.  It ought to be a vital truth that would give soul and vim to a body with the differing members of your army.  You, with your ideal theory, and Billy Wilson with his ‘Blood and Baltimore!’ Try human freedom.  That’s high and sharp and broad.”

Ben drew a step closer.

“You are shrewd, Lamar.  I am to go below all constitutions or expediency or existing rights, and tell Ben here that he is free?  When once the Government accepts that doctrine, you, as a Rebel, must be let alone.”

The slave was hid back in the shade.

“Dorr,” said Lamar, “you know I’m a groping, ignorant fellow, but it seems to me that prating of constitutions and existing rights is surface talk; there is a broad common-sense underneath, by whose laws the world is governed, which your statesmen don’t touch often.  You in the North, in your dream of what shall be, shut your eyes to what is.  You want a republic where every man’s voice shall be heard in the council, and the majority shall rule.  Granting that the free population are educated to a fitness for this,—­(God forbid I should grant it with the Snake-hunters before my eyes!)—­look here!”

He turned round, and drew the slave out into the light:  he crouched down, gaping vacantly at them.

“There is Ben.  What, in God’s name, will you do with him?  Keep him a slave, and chatter about self-government?  Pah!  The country is paying in blood for the lie, to-day.  Educate him for freedom, by putting a musket in his hands?  We have this mass of heathendom drifted on our shores by your will as well as mine.  Try to bring them to a level with the whites by a wrench, and you’ll waken out of your dream to a sharp reality.  Your Northern philosophy ought to be old enough to teach you that spasms in the body-politic shake off no atom of disease,—­that reform, to be enduring, must be patient, gradual, inflexible as the Great Reformer.  ‘The mills of God,’ the old proverb says, ‘grind surely.’  But, Dorr, they grind exceeding slow!”

Dorr watched Lamar with an amused smile.  It pleased him to see his brain waking up, eager, vehement.  As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked of him like a clod, heedless that his face deepened in stupor, that his eyes had caught a strange, gloomy treachery,—­we all do the same, you know.

“What is your remedy, Lamar?  You have no belief in the right of Secession, I know,” said Dorr.