“Ah, boys, blood will tell!” cried the Preacher, shaking hands with each man as they left.
A single round from the guns, and it was over. The yellow flag of Spain, lit with the sunset splendour of a world empire, faded from the sky of the West.
A new naval power had arisen to disturb the dreams of statesmen. The Oregon, that fierce leviathan of hammered steel, had made her mark upon the globe. In a long black trail of smoke and ribbon of foam, she had circled the earth without a pause for breath. The thunder of her lips of steel over the shattered hulks of a European navy proclaimed the advent of a giant democracy that struck terror to the hearts of titled snobs.
He who dreamed this monster of steel, felt her heart beat, saw her rush through foaming seas to victory, before the pick of a miner had struck the ore for her ribs from a mountain side, was a child of the Confederacy—that Confederacy whose desperate genius had sent then Alabama spinning round the globe in a whirlwind of fire.
America united at last and invincible, waked to the consciousness of her resistless power.
And, most marvellous of all, this hundred days of war had re-united the Anglo-Saxon race. This sudden union of the English speaking people in friendly alliance disturbed the equilibrium of the world, and confirmed the Anglo-Saxon in his title to the primacy of racial sway.
CHAPTER X—ANOTHER DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
ALMOST every problem of national life had been illumined and made more hopeful by the searchlight of war save one—the irrepressible conflict between the African and the Anglo-Saxon in the development of our civilisation. The glare of war only made the blackness of this question the more apparent.