"Yes."
"How?"
"When I finished reading it, I felt like the overgrown boy who stubbed his toe. It hurt too bad to laugh. And I'm too big to cry."
"You amaze me, sir."
"That's the way I feel, my friend."
He paused, walked to the window, and gazed out at the first lights that began to flicker in the windows of the Capitol across the river.
"That book," he went on evenly, "is an appeal to the heart of the world against Slavery. It is purely an appeal to sentiment, to the emotions, to passion, if you will—the passions of the mob and the men who lead mobs. And it's terrible. As terrible as an army with banners. I heard the throb of drums through its pages. It will work the South into a frenzy. It will make millions of Abolitionists in the North who could not be reached by the coarser methods of abuse. It will prepare the soil for a revolution. If the right man appears at the right moment with a lighted torch—"
"That's just why, sir, as the foremost citizen of Virginia, you must answer this slander. I have brought a reporter from the Globe with me for that purpose. Shall I call him,"
"A reporter from a daily paper with a circulation of fifteen thousand?"
"Your word, Colonel Lee, will be heard at this moment to the ends of the earth, sir!"