kly suppressed by the gavel.

The negroes placed him in an armchair facing the semicircle of Senators,
and crouched down on their haunches beside him. Their kinky heads, black
skin, thick lips, white teeth, and flat noses made for the moment a
curious symbolic frame for the chalk-white passion of the old Commoner's
face.

No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a
race of empire builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the
night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the "equal" of
their master, grinning at his forms of justice, the evolution of forty
centuries of Aryan genius. To their brute strength the white fanatic in
the madness of his hate had appealed, and for their hire he had bartered
the birthright of a mighty race of freemen.

The speaker hurried to his conclusion that the half-fainting master might
deliver his message. In the meanwhile his eyes, cold and thrilling, sought
the secrets of the souls of the judges before him.

He had not come to plead or persuade. He had eluded the vigilance of his
daughter and nurse, escaped with the aid of the brown woman and her black
allies, and at the peril of his life had come to command. Every energy of
his indomitable will he was using now to keep from fainting. He felt that
if he could but look those men in the face they would not dare to defy his
word.

He shambled painfully to his feet amid a silence that was awful. Again the
sheer wonder of the man's personality held the imagination of the
audience. His audacity, his fanaticism, and the strange contradictions of
his character stirred the mind of friend and foe alike--this man who
tottered there before them, holding off Death with his big ugly left hand,
while with his right he clutched at the throat of his foe! Honest and
dishonest, cruel and tender, great and mean, a party leader who scorned
public opinion, a man of conviction, yet the most unscrupulous politician,
a philosopher who preached the equality of man, yet a tyrant who hated the
world and despised all men!

His very presence before them an open defiance of love and life and death,
would not his word ring omnipotent when the verdict was rendered? Every
man in the great courtroom believed it as he looked on the rows of
Senators hanging on his lips.

He spoke at first with unnatural vigour, a faint flush of fever lighting
his white face, his voice quivering yet penetrating.

"Upon that man among