He leaned forward to flick the ashes from his cigar, while the sunshine sprinkling through the junipers deepened the rapt and eager look in his face. "It all comes back to this—the whole problem of life," he pursued after a moment. "It all comes back to the builders. We are—with apologies for the platitude—a nation of idealists. It is our ability to believe in the incredible, to dream great dreams, not our practical efficiency, that has held our body politic together. Because we build in the sky, I believe we are building to last——"
"But our mistakes, our follies, our insanities——?" As Blackburn paused the voice of Colonel Ashburton fell like music on the stillness. "Even our fairest dreams—the dream of individual freedom—what has become of it? Show me the man who is free among us to-day?" With his bowed white head, his blanched aristocratic features, and his general air of having been crushed and sweetened by adversity, he reminded Caroline of one of the perpetual mourners, beside the weeping willow and the classic tomb, on the memorial brooch her great-grandmother used to wear.
"I believe you are wrong," replied Blackburn slowly, "for, in spite of the voice of the demagogue, America is a land of individual men, not of classes, and the whole theory of the American State rests upon the rights and obligations of the citizen. If the American Republic survives, it will be because it is founded upon the level of conscience—not upon the peaks of inspiration. We have no sovereign mind, no governing class, no body of men with artificial privileges and special obligations. Every American carries in his person the essential elements of the State, and is entrusted with its duties. To this extent at least, Colonel, your man is free."
"Free to sink, or to swim with the current?"
Blackburn smiled as he answered. "Well, I suppose your pessimism is natural. In Colonel Ashburton, Sloane, you behold a sorrowful survivor of the Age of Heroes. By Jove, there were giants in those days!" Then he grew serious again, and went on rapidly, with the earnest yet impersonal note in his voice: "Of course, we know that as long as a people is striving for its civil rights, for equality of right before the law, there is a definite objective goal. Now, in theory at least, these things have been attained, and we are confronted to-day with the more difficult task of adjusting the interests, without impairing the rights, of the individual man. The tangled skeins of social and economic justice must be unravelled before we can weave them into the fabric of life."
"And for the next fifty years this is our business," said Sloane, speaking suddenly in the rich, strong voice which seemed to strike with unerring blows at the root of the question.
"Yes, this is our business for the next fifty years. I believe with you, Sloane, that this may be done. I believe that this work will be accomplished when, and only when, the citizen recognizes that he is the State, and is charged with the duties and the obligations of the State to his fellowmen. To reach this end we must overthrow class prejudice, and realize that justice to all alike is the cornerstone of democracy. We must put aside sectional feeling and create a national ideal by merging the State into the nation. We must learn to look beyond the material prosperity of America and discern her true destiny as the champion of the oppressed, the giver of light. It is for us to do this. After all, we are America, you and I and Ashburton and the man who works in my garden. When all is said, a nation is only an organized crowd, and can rise no higher, or sink no lower, than its source—the spirit of the men who compose it. As a man thinketh in his heart so his country will be."
For a moment there was silence, and then Sloane said sharply: "There is one thing that always puzzles me in you Southerners, and that is the apparent conflict between the way you think and the way you act, or to put it a trifle more accurately, between your political vision and your habit of voting. You see I am a practical man, an inveterate believer in the fact as the clinching argument in any question, and I confess that I have failed so far to reconcile your theory with your conduct. You are nationalists and idealists in theory, you Virginians, yet by your votes you maintain the solid South, as you call it, as if it were not a part of the American Republic. You cherish and support this heresy regardless of political issues, and often in defiance of your genuine convictions. I like you Virginians. Your history fascinates me like some brilliantly woven tapestry; but I can never understand how this people, whose heroic qualities helped to create the Union, can remain separated, at least in act, from American purposes and ideals. You give the lie to your great statesmen; you shatter their splendid dream for the sake of a paradox. Your one political party battens on the very life of the South—since you preserve its independence in spite of representatives whom you oppose, and, not infrequently, in spite even of principles that you reject. However broad may be our interpretation of recent events, as long as this heresy prevails, the people of the South cannot hope to recover their historic place in the councils of the nation. And this condition," he concluded abruptly, "retards the development of our future. A short while ago—so short a while, indeed, as the year 1896—the security of the nation was endangered by the obsession of a solid and unbreakable South. This danger passed yesterday, but who knows when it may come again?"
As he finished, Blackburn leaned eagerly forward as if he were bracing himself to meet an antagonist. To the man whose inner life is compacted of ideas, the mental surgery of the man of facts must always appear superficial—a mere trick of technique. A new light seemed to have fallen over him, and, through some penetrating sympathy, Caroline understood that he lived in a white blaze not of feeling, but of thought. It was a passion of the mind instead of the heart, and she wondered if he had ever loved Angelica as he loved this fugitive, impersonal image of service?
"I sometimes doubt," he said gravely, "if a man can ever understand a country unless he was born in it—unless its sun and dust have entered into his being."