!"

"But they banished you for that?"

"Yes, that's why they put me out of Washington, I suppose. I've
been twice banished. That is why I came here to this country.
Maybe, Sir, that is why I came to you, here! Who shall say as to
these things? If only I could feel your faith, your beliefs to be
the same as mine, I'd go away happy, for then I'd know it had been
a plan, somehow, somewhere--for us, maybe."

His throat worked strongly. There was some struggle in the man.
At last he spoke, and quietly. "I see what separates us now. It
is the wall of our convictions. You are specifically an
abolitionist, just as you are in general a revolutionist. I'm on
the other side. That's between us, then? An abstraction!"

"I don't think so. There are _three_ walls between us. The first
you put up when you first met me. The second is what you call your
traditions, your belief in wasting human life. The third--it's
this thing of which you must not speak. Why should I ponder as to
that last wall, when two others, insurmountable, lie between?"

"Visionary, subjective!"

"Then let us be concrete if you like. Take the case of the girl
Lily. She was the actual cause of your getting hurt, of many men
being killed. Why?"

"Because she was a runaway slave. The law has to be enforced,
property must be protected, even if it costs life sometimes.
There'd be no government otherwise. We men have to take our
chances in a time like that. The duty is plain."

"How utterly you fail of the truth! That's not why there was blood
spilled over her. Do you know who she is?"

"No," he said.

"She is the daughter of your _friend_, Judge Clayton, of the bench
of justice in your commonwealth. _That_ is why she wants to run
away! Her father does not know he is her father. God has His own
way of righting such things."

"There are things we must not talk about in this slavery question.
Stop! I did not, of course, know this. And Clayton did not know!"

"There are things which ought not to be; but if you vote for
oppression, if you vote yonder in your legislature for the
protection of this institution, if you must some day vote yonder in
Congress for its extension, for the right to carry it into other
lands--the same lands where now the feet of freedom-seekers are
hurrying from all over the world, so strangely, so wonderfully--then
you vote for a compromise that God never intended to go through or
to endure. Is that your v