You had money, you had power, you had leisure, you had intelligence, you possessed the earth; all things were possible unto you. Did you say to one another: "These poor souls are our brethren. For them Christ died on Calvary. What can we do to make their lives bright and happy?" No; no; you cried out, "'On with the dance!' Let them go down into the bottomless pit!" And you smiled and said to one another, in the words of the first murderer, when he lied to God: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Nay, you said further to one another, "There is no God!" For you thought, if there was one, surely He would not permit the injustice manifest in the world. But, lo! He is here. Did you think to escape him? Did you think the great Father of Cause and Effect--the All-knowing, the universe-building God,--would pass you by? As you sowed, so must you reap. Evil has but one child--Death! For hundreds of years you have nursed and nurtured Evil. Do you complain if her monstrous progeny is here now, with sword and torch? What else did you expect? Did you think she would breed angels? Your ancestors, more than two centuries ago, established and permitted Slavery. What was the cry of the bondman to them? What the sobs of the mother torn from her child--the wife from her husband--on the auction block? Who among them cared for the lacerated bodies, the shameful and hopeless lives? They were merry; they sang and they danced; and they said, "Gods sleeps." But a day came when there was a corpse at every fireside. And not the corpse of the black stranger--the African--the slave;--but the corpses of fair, bright-faced men; their cultured, their manly, their noble, their best-loved. And, North and South, they sat, rocking themselves to and fro, in the midst of the shards and ashes of desolation, crying aloud for the lives that would come back to bless them never, nevermore. God wipes out injustice with suffering; wrong with blood; sin with death. You can no more get beyond the reach of His hand than you can escape from the planet. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PRINCE GIVES HIS LAST BRIBE