“... he is right—he is right—and I burn in flesh and soul and blood and bone of these peoples of Europe who made me. Their flesh cries to my flesh and it answers with a tongue that has been dumb too long. Men of America! Men who have lately been sons of the warring nations and have crept off here just in time—by a decade or by a century—to stand with whole skins and unbroken bones—let’s have done with it! Do we face our insults as men—or do we stand silent and bid for more? And are we another kind of creature? Do we understand what those men suffer? Are their cries of agony to us in another tongue? Have blood and misery and madness a language of their own, and are we deaf to it—or do we know with every fibre in us what it is they are going through, what it is they ask of us, what it is that if we are men we must give them—and give them now! For now their provocation is our provocation. I ask you what it shall be—the safe way of intervention? Or the hands of human beings, to succor the naked hands of the desperate and the dying of our own kin—our own kin! And to revenge our wrong!”
In an instant the hall was shattered by a thousand cries. Men leaped to their feet. Some sat still. Some wept. But the cries which came from no one knew whom of them, rose and roared distinguishably!
“To war ... war ... war!”
The Inger had risen and stood stooping forward, his hands on the rail, his eyes sweeping the crowd. His look seemed to lick up something that it had long wanted, and to burn it in his face. He was smiling with his teeth slightly showing.
“Ah-h-h,” he said within his breath, and said it again, and stood rocking a little and breathing hard.
The demonstration lasted on as if a pent presence had lapped them to itself and possessed them. A man, and another tried to speak, but no one listened. A few in the front rows left the hall, and, ominous, and barely audible, a hissing began in the galleries and ran down the great bank of heads, and scourged the few as they gained the door.
What at last silenced them was the dignity and status of a man who took the stage. He made no effort to speak. He merely waited. Presently they were quiet, though not all reseated themselves.
He was a man of more than middle years, with a face worn and tortured—but it was as if the torture had been long ago.
“My neighbors,” he said, “will some one tell me why you want to kill your neighbors across the water?”