The General rose to his feet and stood before the fire facing the handful of men.  “I can continue this anecdote from the point that is more easily than my friend the Judge,” spoke the General.  “I was in the confidence of that countryman of mine.  I know.  It was so that after he had been thus slightly useful to my friend the Judge, who was the Captain McLane at that time—­”

The Judge broke in with a shout of deep laughter worthy of a boy of eighteen.  “He ’slightly obliged me by saving my life.”  The American, threw that into the Russian’s smooth sentences.  “I put that fact before the jury.”

The four men listening laughed also, but the Russian held up a hand and went on gravely:  “It was quite simple, that episode, and the man’s pleasure.  I knew him well.  But what followed was not ordinary.  The Captain McLane saw to it that the soldier had his chance.  He became an officer.  He went alive through the war, and at the end the Captain McLane made it possible that he should be educated.  His career was a gift from the Captain McLane—­from my friend the Judge to that man, who is now—­” the finished sentence halted a mere second—­“who is now a responsible person of Russia.

“And it is the incident of that sort, it is that incident itself which I know, which leads me to combat—­” he turned with a deep bow—­“the position of the Sena-torr that the great war did not make for democracy.  Gentlemen, my compatriot was a peasant, a person of ignorance, yet with a desire of fulfilling his possibilities.  He had been born in social chains and tied to most sordid life, beyond hope, in old Russia.  To try to shake free he had gone to America.  But it was that caldron of fire, the war, which freed him, which fused his life and the life of the Captain McLane, so different in opportunity, and burned from them all trivialities and put them, stark-naked of advantages and of drawbacks artificial, side by side, as two lives merely.  It made them—­brothers.  One gave and the other took as brothers without thought of false pride.  They came from the furnace men.  Both.  Which is democracy—­a chance for a tree to grow, for a flame to burn, for a river to flow; a chance for a man to become a man and not rest a vegetable anchored to the earth as—­Oh, God!—­for many centuries the Russian mujiks have rested.  It is that which I understand by democracy.  Freedom of development for everything which wants to develop.  It was the earthquake of war which broke chains, loosened dams, cleared the land for young forests.  It was war which made Russia a republic, which threw down the kingships, which joined common men and princes as comrades.  God bless that liberating war!  God grant that never in all centuries may this poor planet have another!  God save democracy—­humanity!  Does the Sena-torr yet believe that the great war retarded democracy?” The Russian’s brilliant, smouldering eyes swept about, inquiring.