"My dear Countess," said Carlisle, "you are, as usual, brilliant. Your imagination vaults—your daring is splendid. But as usual you are visionary and impractical. Buy them? To do this would require the credit of a nation! It would be subversive of all peace and all industry. You do not realize the sums required. You do not realize how vast are the complications."
She stepped closer to him in her eagerness.
"All it needs is money, and management. A start, and the country will follow. Mr. Fillmore himself was about to recommend it, in his last message. Let me furnish the money, and do you attend to the complications."
Carlisle rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "It's beautiful; it may be wise, but it's impossible. It would take a king's credit."
"At least we might begin with such funds as are already at hand," smiled the Countess St. Auban. "It might be difficult? I suppose the building of the pyramids was difficult. Yet they were begun. Yet they are finished. Yet they stand, complete, to-day."
"It is hardly for me to advise in a case so grave as that," said Carlisle. "I should not undertake it. Have you really considered?"
"I have often followed over the same old course of reasoning, South against North," she said, smiling at him. "Come now, a revolutionist and two abolitionists should do much. You still can fight, though they have taken away your sword."
"Some say that the courts will settle these mooted points," Carlisle went on; "others, that Congress must do so. Yet others are unwilling that even the courts should take it up, and insist that the Constitution is clear and explicit already. These Southerners say that Congress should make an end to it, by specifically declaring that men have a right to take into any new country what they lawfully own—that is to say, these slaves; because that territory was bought in common by North and South. The South is just as honest and sincere as the North is, and to be fair about it, I don't believe it's right to claim that the South wants the Union destroyed. A few hotheads talk of that in South Carolina, in Mississippi, but that is precisely what the sober judgment of the South doesn't desire. Let us match those secessionists against the abolitionists," he grinned. "The first think they have law back of them. The latter know they have none!"
"No," she said, "only the higher law, that of human democracy.
No,—we've nothing concrete—except Lily!"
"Yes, but let me argue you out of this, Countess. Really, I can see no just reason why the proud and prosperous North should wish to destroy the proud and prosperous South. If the South remains in the Union it must be considered a part of the Union. New England did not believe in taxation without representation. Ought it to enforce that doctrine on the South?"