is true that there’s too much official and indirect power.  Often and often the thing a whole nation can’t settle is just the thing a family could settle.  Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.  Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they only wanted a week at Brighton.  There is something in Smith’s notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it into practice.  You have the prisoner; you have the documents.  Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people, such as might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island.  Let us do this thing ourselves.  Let us go into that house there and sit down and find out with our own eyes and ears whether this thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a man or a monster.  If we can’t do a little thing like that, what right have we to put crosses on ballot papers?”

Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool, saw in that glance that Moon was gaining ground.  The motives that led Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym.  All Arthur’s instincts were on the side of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric.  To play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend, would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official part he had played that afternoon was very painful.  He was not likely to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let sleeping dogs lie.

On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are possible that seem crazy to the English.  Regulations and authorities exactly like one of Innocent’s pranks or one of Michael’s satires really exist, propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men.  Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and as unexpected as an apple-pie bed.  States where no man may have a cigarette, States where any man may have ten wives, very strict prohibition States, very lax divorce States—­all these large local vagaries had prepared Cyrus Pym’s mind for small local vagaries in a smaller country.  Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or Italian, utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are, he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon.  It is firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be some Britannic institution.

Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.  Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this being moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy and humane flippancy.