We are now about to record one of the most remarkable feats of oratory known to history.  Belton stood with his massive, intellectual head thrown back and a look of determined defiance shot forth from his eyes.  His power in debate was well known and the members settled themselves back for a powerful onslaught of some kind; but exactly what to expect they did not know.

Fortunately for Belton’s purpose, surprise, wonder, expectancy, had, for the time being, pushed into the background the more violent emotions surging a moment before.

Belton turned his head slowly, letting his eye sweep the entire circle of faces before him, and there seemed to be a force and an influence emanating from the look.  He began:  “I call upon you all to bear me witness that I have ever in word and deed been zealous in the work of building up this Imperium, whose holy mission it is to grapple with our enemy and wrest from him our stolen rights, given to us by nature and nature’s God.  If there be one of you that knowest aught against my patriotism, I challenge him to declare it now; and if there be anything to even cast a suspicion upon me, I shall gladly court a traitor’s ignoble doom.”

He paused here.  No one accepted the challenge, for Belton was the acknowledged guiding star that had led the Imperium to the high point of efficiency where Bernard found it.

“By your silence,” Belton continued, “I judge that my patriotism is above suspicion; and this question being settled, I shall feel free to speak all that is within me on the subject now before me.  I have a word to say in defence of the south—­”

“No!  No!  No!  No!” burst from a score of throats.  Friends crowded around Belton and begged him to desist.  They told him that the current was so strong that it was death to all future usefulness to try to breast it.

Belton waved them away and cried out in impassioned tones:  “On her soil I was born; on her bosom I was reared; into her arms I hope to fall in death; and I shall not from fear of losing popular favor desist from pointing out the natural sources from which her sins arise, so that when judgment is pronounced justice will not hesitate to stamp it with her righteous seal.”

“Remember your scars!” shouted one.

“Yes, I am scarred,” returned Belton.  “I have been in the hands of an angry mob; I have dangled from a tree at the end of a rope; I have felt the murderous pistol drive cold lead into my flesh; I have been accounted dead and placed upon the dissecting table; I have felt the sharp surgical knife ripping my flesh apart when I was supposed to be dead; all of these hardships and more besides I have received at the hands of the South; but she has not and cannot drive truth from my bosom, and the truth shall I declare this day.”

Seeing that it was useless to attempt to deter him, Belton continued his speech without interruption:  “There are many things in the message of our most worthy President that demand attention.  It was indeed an awful sin for the Anglo-Saxon to enslave the negro.  But in judging a people we must judge them according to the age in which they lived, and the influence that surrounded them.