to this little
babe to fight its hopeless fight for life so bravely and so long. Odin
was dead whose sons dared go to hell with their own people and Frega was
no more whose magic filled with molten fire the veins of all true lovers
and nerved with desperate courage the hand of her who guarded the purity
of her body and the happiness of her child. The White Christ had come
when wealth and riches and conquests had upheaped wrongs, upon the heads
of the wrongers, the cross had triumphed over the hammer when the fierce
freedom of the North had worn itself out in selfish foray; the
shaven-pated priest had come to teach patience as God-given when a
robber-caste grew up to whom it seemed wise to uproot the old ideas from
the mind of the people whose spent courage it robbed. Alas, for the days
when it was not righteous to submit to wrong nor wicked to strike tyranny
to the ground, when one met it, no matter where! Alas, for the men of the
Past and the women, their faith and their courage and their virtue and
their gods, the hearts large to feel and the brains prompt to think and
the arms strong to do, the bare feet that followed the plough and trod in
the winepress of God and the brown hands that milked cows and tore kings
from their thrones by their beard! They were gone and a feebler people
spoke their tongue and bore their name, a people that bent its back to
the rod and bared its head to the cunning and did not rise as one man
when in its midst a baby was murdered while all around a helpless
kinsfolk were being robbed and wronged.

"For the past, who would not choose it? Who would not, if they could,
drop civilisation from them as one shakes off a horrid nightmare at the
dawning of the day? Who would not be again a drover of cattle, a follower
of the plough, a milker of cows, a spinner of wool-yarn by the fireside,
to be, as well, strong and fierce and daring, slave to none and fearing
none, ignorant alike of all the wisdom and all the woes of this hateful
life that is?

"For only one moment of the past if the whole past could not be! Only to
be free for a moment if the rest were impossible! Only to lose one's hair
and bare one's feet and girdle again the single garment round one's waist
and to be filled with the frenzy that may madden still as it maddened our
mothers when the Roman legions conquered! Only to stand for a moment,
free, on the barricade, outlawed and joyous, with Death, Freedom's
impregnable citadel, opening