“And now you hope for a second Spartacus?  Or will you yourself lead a rebellion of the slaves?  You are the man for it, and I can be secret.”

“If it has to be, why not?” he replied, and his eyes sparkled with a strange fire.  But seeing that she shrank from him, a smile passed over his countenance, and he added in a soothing tone:  “Do not be alarmed, my child; what must come will come, without another Spartacus, or bloodshed, or turmoil.  And you, with your clear eyes and your kind heart, would you find it difficult to distinguish right from wrong, and to feel for the sorrows of others—?  Yes, perhaps!  For what will not custom excuse and sanctify?  You can pity the bird which is shut into a cage too small for it, or the mule which breaks down under too heavy a load, and the cruelty which hurts them rouses your indignation.  But for the man whom a terrible fate has robbed of his freedom, often through the fault of another, whose soul endures even greater torments than his despised body, you have no better comfort than the advice which might indeed serve a philosopher, but which to him is bitter mockery:  to bear his woes with patience.  He is only a slave, bought, or perhaps inherited.  Which of you ever thinks of asking who gave you, who are free, the right to enslave half of all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and to rob them of the highest prerogative of humanity?  I know that many philosophers have spoken of slavery as an injustice done by the strong to the weak:  but they shrugged their shoulders over it nevertheless, and excused it as an inevitable evil; for, thought they, who will serve me if my slave is regarded as my equal?  You only smile at this confusion of the meditative recluses, but you forget”—­and a sinister fire glowed in his eyes—­“that the slave, too, has a soul, in which the same feelings stir as in your own.  You never think how a proud man may feel whose arm you brand, and whose very breath of life is indignity; or what a slave thinks who is spurned by his master’s foot, though noble blood may run in his veins.  All living things, even the plants in the garden, have a right to happiness, and only develop fully in freedom, and under loving care; and yet one half of mankind robs the other half of this right.  The sum total of suffering and sorrow to which Fate had doomed the race is recklessly multiplied and increased by the guilt of men themselves.  But the cry of the poor and wretched has gone up to heaven, and now that the fullness of time is come, ‘Thus far, and no farther,’ is the word.  No wild revolutionary has been endowed with a giant’s strength to burst the bonds of the victims asunder.  No, the Creator and Preserver of the world sent his Son to redeem the poor in spirit, and, above all, the brethren and the sisters who are weary and heavy laden.  The magical word which shall break the bars of the prisons where the chains of the slaves are heard is Love. . . .  But you, Melissa, can but half comprehend all this,” he added, interrupting the ardent flow of his enthusiastic speech.  “You can not understand it all.  For you, too, child, the fullness of time is coming; for you, too, freeborn though you are, are, I know, one of the heavy laden who patiently suffer the burden laid upon you.  You too—­But keep close to me; we shall find it difficult to get through this throng.”