s backed.) for trying
to pass a Bill for flogging the niggers, and we lost fifty pounds we
might have got for the church?' And he said, 'My wife, cannot God be
worshipped as well under the dome of the heaven He made as in a golden
palace? Shall a man keep silence, when he sees oppression, to earn money
for God? If I have defended the black man when I believed him to be
wronged, shall I not also defend the white man, my flesh-brother? Shall
we speak when one man is wronged and not when it is another?'

"And she said, 'Yes, but you have your family and yourself to think of!
Why are you always in opposition to the people who could do something
for us? You are only loved by the poor. If it is necessary for you to
attack some one, why don't you attack the Jews for killing Christ, or
Herod, or Pontius Pilate; why don't you leave alone the men who are in
power today, and who with their money can crush you!'

"And he said, 'Oh my wife, those Jews, and Herod, and Pontius Pilate are
long dead. If I should preach of them now, would it help them? Would it
save one living thing from their clutches? The past is dead, it lives
only for us to learn from. The present, the present only, is ours to
work in, and the future ours to create. Is all the gold of Johannesburg
or are all the diamonds in Kimberley worth, that one Christian man
should fall by the hand of his fellows--aye, or one heathen brother?'

"And she answered, 'Oh, that is all very well. If you were a really
eloquent preacher, and could draw hundreds of men about you, and in time
form a great party with you at its head, I shouldn't mind what you said.
But you, with your little figure and your little voice, who will ever
follow you? You will be left all alone; that is all the good that will
ever come to you through it.'

"And he said, 'Oh my wife, have I not waited and watched and hoped that
they who are nobler and stronger than I, all over this land, would lift
up their voices and speak--and there is only a deadly silence? Here
and there one has dared to speak aloud; but the rest whisper behind the
hand; one says, 'My son has a post, he would lose it if I spoke loud';
and another says, 'I have a promise of land'; and another, 'I am
socially intimate with these men, and should lose my social standing if
I let my voice be heard.' Oh my wife, our land, our goodly land, which
we had hoped would be free and strong among the peoples of earth, is
rotten and honeycombed with the t