“I move you,” said Mr. Belcher, rising, and throwing open his overcoat, “that the Rev. Solomon Snow, whom I am exceedingly glad to see present, open our deliberations with prayer.”

The moderator, forgetting apparently that the motion had not been put, thereupon invited the reverend gentleman to the platform, from which, when his service had been completed, he with dignity retired—­but with the painful consciousness that in some way Mr. Belcher had become aware of the philanthropic task he had undertaken.  He knew he was beaten, at the very threshold of his enterprise—­that his conversations of the morning among his neighbors had been reported, and that Paul Benedict and his fellow-sufferers would be none the better for him.

The business connected with the various articles of the warrant was transacted without notable discussion or difference.  Mr. Belcher’s ticket for town officers, which he took pains to show to those around him, was unanimously adopted.  When it came to the question of schools, Mr. Belcher indulged in a few flights of oratory.  He thought it impossible for a town like Sevenoaks to spend too much money for schools.  He felt himself indebted to the public school for all that he was, and all that he had won.  The glory of America, in his view—­its pre-eminence above all the exhausted and decayed civilizations of the Old World—­was to be found in popular education.  It was the distinguishing feature of our new and abounding national life.  Drop it, falter, recede, and the darkness that now hangs over England, and the thick darkness that envelops the degenerating hordes of the Continent, would settle down upon fair America, and blot her out forever from the list of the earth’s teeming nations.  He would pay good wages to teachers.  He would improve school-houses, and he would do it as a matter of economy.  It was, in his view, the only safeguard against the encroachments of a destructive pauperism.  “We are soon,” said Mr. Belcher, “to consider whether we will take any steps for the improvement of the condition of the poor, now supported at the public charge.  Here is our first step.  Let us endow our children with such a degree of intelligence that pauperism shall be impossible.  In this thing I go hand in hand with the clergy.  On many points I do not agree with them, but on this matter of popular education, I will do them the honor to say that they have uniformly been in advance of the rest of us.  I join hands with them here to-day, and, as any advance in our rate of taxation for schools will bear more heavily upon me than upon any other citizen—­I do not say it boastingly, gentlemen—­I pledge myself to support and stand by it.”

Mr. Belcher’s speech, delivered with majestic swellings of his broad chest, the ostentatious removal of his overcoat, and brilliant passages of oratorical action, but most imperfectly summarized in this report, was received with cheers.  Mr. Snow himself feebly joined in the approval, although he knew it was intended to disarm him.  His strength, his resolution, his courage, ebbed away with sickening rapidity; and he was not reassured by a glance toward the door, where he saw, sitting quite alone, Miss Butterworth herself, who had come in for the purpose partly of strengthening him, and partly of informing herself concerning the progress of a reform which had taken such strong hold upon her sympathies.