"I have fought that fight to this very moment. But more important than anything I have done has been the magnificent unity of our peoples in their determination to struggle against fascism in all of its black forms. It has not been the President who has led the people in this great crusade. No, my countrymen. It has been the people who have created and given their mandate to the President, to the Congress."
Tabio had never learned a single orator's trick. As a statesman, he retained all the speaking habits he had originally formed during his early years as a young professor of history at the university. Teaching, he once explained, was the process of thinking aloud. And at this moment, in what he guessed would be his last speech to the nation, Anibal Tabio returned to the concepts which had gone into his great book on the relationships of people to government in modern democracy. For the better part of thirty minutes, he explored these relationships again. After all these years, the professor was back in class, patiently expounding his ideas to a new set of faces.
"Well, that is the state and the people. I have not told you anything new. You have heard this all before from me." Tabio was laughing softly, and at himself. "But that is what happens when the people elect a pedantic professor as their President. Instead of a speech, they get a long, dry lecture."
Tabio paused, frowned at the people who sat hushed in the hall. "Have you forgotten how to laugh?" he asked. A few loyal followers tried to laugh. "Good," Tabio said.
"But I am not finished, my countrymen. I have spoken of the ideal democratic state. Many of us like to feel that we have achieved this state. That perfection is ours. This is dangerous thinking. Of course, we are not as imperfect as a certain newspaper in San Hermano and a certain organization which has usurped the symbol of brotherly love as its emblem"—this time he drew some real laughter—"we are not as imperfect as they would have you believe.
"But even if we were the most perfect state in the world, today this would mean very little. Our chances of surviving, of progressing until the Republic of Man became even more attractive than the Kingdom of God, our chances of surviving at all would still be obscured. If our nation were some remote island in the skies, whirling on its own axis, remote from all other lands, perhaps then I would have no fears for our future.
"We are not this remote planet unto ourselves. We share a world with a hundred nations, a thousand races. I do not regret that we are part of this world. I think we should rejoice in our membership in the world's family of races. But we must not lose sight of the fact that our nation, no less than any other nation, be it free or fascist, is part of this strange family.
"We must never forget that the great war which started in unhappy Spain in July, 1936, was not a war between good and evil in Spain alone. It was a war not of two Spanish ideas but of two fundamental world ideas. It was the start of the universal death struggle between the slave-world ideas of fascism and the free-world ideas of political and economic democracy. It was the start of the fascist war against freedom that has now spread all over the world."
Tabio glanced at his two sons. He accepted a glass of water, smiling at the legislators in the front rows as he drank. "Freedom," he said, "is there a man who does not know the meaning of the word?" Before he returned to the theme of the world war which had started in Spain, he explored the full meaning of freedom in modern times. It was only after he had delivered a profound essay on freedom which shook Matthew Hall until the American felt a lump rising in his throat that Tabio picked up the earlier threads.
"In Spain, then, the forces of freedom suffered a heavy loss. But what of those small men with narrow little minds who held the reins of so much of the world's power while Spain bled? What of these tiny statesmen, these sleek somnambulists who held lace handkerchiefs before their narrow mouths and laughed while fascism marched in Spain? What of these wretches who, through the immoral instrument called non-intervention, sought to end freedom in Spain in the criminal conviction that the blood of Spain alone would satisfy the fascist beast?