Not a voice has been lifted in his favor. If he has a friend he is apparently afraid to open his mouth.
And then the giant form of Jim Lane slowly rises. He looks quietly over the crowd as if passing in review the tragic events of four years. Is he going to add his voice to this chorus of rage? A year ago in the same Grand Council he had a bitter grievance against the President and assailed him furiously. Yesterday he was at the White House and came away with a shadow on his strong face.
He stood for a long time in silence and seemed to be scanning each individual in the crowd of tense listeners.
And then his deep voice broke the stillness. His words rang like the boom of cannon and their penetrating power seemed to pierce the brick walls of the room.
"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Grand Council:
"To stir up sore and wounded hearts to bitterness requires no skill or power of oratory. To address the minds of men sickened by disaster, wearied by long trial, heated by passion, bewildered by uncertainty, heavy with grief, and cunningly to turn them into one vindictive channel, into one blind rush of senseless fury requires no great power of oratory and no great mastery of the truth. It may be the trick of a charlatan!"
He paused and gazed with deliberate and offensive insolence into the faces of the men who had spoken. Their eyes blazed with wrath, and a fierce thrill of excitement swept the crowd.
"For a man to address himself to an assembly like this, however, goaded to madness by suffering, sorrow, humiliation, perplexity—and now roused by venomous arts to an almost unanimous condemnation of the innocent—I say to address you, turn you in your tracks and force you to go the other way—that would indeed be a feat of transcendent oratorical power. I am no orator—but I am going to tell you the truth and the truth will make you do that thing!"
Men began to lean forward in their seats now as with impassioned faith he told the story of the matchless work the great lonely spirit had wrought for his people in the White House during the past passion-torn years. His last sentence rang like the clarion peal of a trumpet:
"Desert him now and the election of George B. McClellan on a 'Peace-at-any-Price' platform is a certainty—the Union is dissevered, the Confederacy established, the slaves reshackled, the dead dishonored and the living disgraced!"