Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparison with this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for his impatience, distinguished why it should be so.  The crust, which is not much, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for the crust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give their just proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardly able to do.  He could not pursue two thoughts on a political question, or grasp the idea of a salutary energy in the hosts animated by his leadership.  There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men might name him worthless dog!

Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of white and blue, of purest white and bluest blue.  Alvan crossed the island bridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to make the young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smooth lake-waters.  Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out with them to feel with them as one of them.  Close beside him the vivid genius of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven in his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble.  Alvan cherished a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with the feeling of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor, with the knowledge of our frailty.  Him, as well as the great Englishman and a Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to that progenitor’s questioning of him, but said ’You know the love of woman:  He loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler.  He too was a worker, a champion worker.  He doated on the prospect of plunging into his work; the vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, and there could be no peace without his prize.

He listened to the workmen’s foot-falls.  The solitary sound and steady motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs.  With the golden light came numbers, workmen still.  Their tread on the stones roused some of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched the scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities, easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered.  These numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time, as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into bondage for not knowing how to use it.  They will have it again:  they have it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of their brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim.  They will have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the leadership of a greater force than they—­in force of brain, in the spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our column of civilized humanity by a combination