e prestige of freedom lost among the nations, of
the way paved for despots. And how needlessly!

"They taunted us, us the source of all their wealth, with the pauper's
deserting the poor-house; we put it to proof; when, lo! with a hue and
cry, the blood-hounds are upon us, the very dogs of war. So needless a
war! For has it not been a fundamental principle that every people has a
right to govern itself? We chose to exercise that right. Was it worth
the while to refuse it? Exhausted, drained, dispeopled, they may chain a
vassal province to their throne; but, woe be to them, upon that
conquering day, their glory has departed from them! The first Revolution
was but the prologue to this: that was sealed in blood; in this might
have been demonstrated the progress made under eighty years of freedom,
by a peaceful separation. It is the Flight of the Tartar Tribe anew, and
the whole barbarous Northern nation pours its hordes after, hangs on the
flank, harasses, impedes, slaughters,--but we reach the shadow of the
Great Wall at last. If we had not the right to leave the league, how had
we the right to enter? If we had not the right to leave, they also had
not the right to withhold us. Yet, when we entered, resigning much,
receiving much, retaining more, we were each a unit, a power, a
commonwealth, a nation, or, as we chose to term it, a State,--as much a
state as any of the great states of Europe, as Britain, as France, as
Spain, and jealously ever since have we individually regarded any
infringement on our integrity. That, and not the mere tangle of race
that in time must unravel itself, is the question of the age. Long ago
it was said that our people, holding it by transmission, never having
struggled for it, would some day cease rightly to value the one chief
bulwark of liberty. Nothing is more true. They of the North will lose
it, we of the South shall gain it; for, battling on a grander scale than
our ancestors, the South is to-day taking out the great _habeas corpus_
of States!"

No matter whether all this was sophistry or truth. Beltran had said
it,--that was enough; so strongly did she feel his personality in what
he wrote, that the soul was exultant, jubilant, defiant, within her.
Other words there were in the letter, such words as are written to but
one; the blood swept up to Vivia's lips as she recalled them, and her
heart sprang and bounded like one of those balls kept in perpetual play
by the leaping, bubbling col