The older man's voice dropped to persuasive tones:
"Isn't there something bigger than fighting for a section? Let's stand by the Nation!"
"That's just what I refuse to do. The United States have never been a Nation. This country is a Republic of Republics—not an Empire. The South is going to fight for the right of local self-government and the liberties our fathers won from the tyrants of the old world. The South is right eternally and forever right. The States of this Union have always been sovereign."
"All right—all right," John growled impatiently, "granted, my boy. Still Secession is impossible. A Nation can't jump out of its own skin once it has grown it. This country has become a Nation. Steam and electricity have made it so. Railroads have bound us together in iron bands. Can't you see that?"
"No, I can't. Right is right."
"But if we have actually grown into a mighty united people with one tongue and one ideal is it right to draw the sword to destroy what God has joined together? Silently, swiftly, surely during the past thirty years we have become one people and the love of the Union has become a deathless passion——"
"You've had a poor way of showing it!" Ned sneered.
"Still, boy, it's true. I didn't realize it myself until that fort was fired on and the flag hauled down. And then it came to me in a blinding flash. Old Webster's voice has been hushed in death, but his soul lives in the hearts of our boys. There's hardly one of us who hasn't repeated at school his immortal words. They came back to me with thrilling power the day I read of that shot. They are ringing in my soul to-day——"
John paused and a rapt look crept into his eyes, as he began slowly to repeat the closing words of Webster's speech:
"'When mine eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; or a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, with fratricidal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as "What is all this worth?" nor those other words of delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterward," but everywhere, spread all over with living light, blazing in all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment dear to every American heart—"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable——"'"