"Why did our people leave America?" he asked. "It was their country, wasn't it?"
"Yes, their country," his father answered solemnly, for that word—country—still had a peculiarly religious sound to it, however outmoded it had now become. "But they—your ancestor and those who agreed with him—believed that what America was going to do was wrong."
"Excuse me, sir, I don't see why it was," O'Hara said. "If the Americans—the Yanks"—and how he loved that word—"didn't like the rest of the world, why shouldn't they have cut themselves off from it?"
"I'm sorry, Emmett, you're too immature to understand," his father answered.
"Isn't that the answer that men give when they themselves do not understand?" O'Hara persisted, and I held my breath.
But his father considered that, as he always considered anything O'Hara said—they were people of logic, people of the exploring turn of mind. At last he said, "Yes, that is true. I've never really understood why they did it. When I was your age, I asked my father these same questions. It seemed unfair that we should have given up what I had so often heard was a considerable position in that world—in North America—to come to this crowded hemisphere as emigrants, as a suspected people, second class by birth and law, and solely in obedience to the dictates of an ideal. But your grandfather himself was a little vague upon these points—after all, he did not remember the trip, he had only heard of it, how his people had been forced to give up all possessions, to begin life anew in a country already too poor to support its own citizens."
"You mention an ideal, sir," O'Hara said. "What is it?"
"It was that this was one world, or should have been one world, not irrevocably halved by the Atomic Curtain. It was that if Providence had wished them separate worlds, It would have made them so."
"Then it was a mistaken ideal," O'Hara said, "for if Providence had intended this to be one world, it would be now."
His father smiled. "That's enough, my young philosopher. To bed with you!"