Lyle gave a long, low, contemptuous whistle, and then burst into a laugh. "What do you call a traitor?" he asked: "to my mind, he is a man who enlists in a good cause, and then, without rhyme or reason, or for some vicious purpose, turns against it. Why, they condemned me to transportation as a traitor, because I took the side of justice and the oppressed. It is more manly to fight for the weak than for the strong. Talk of might against right in this country--I should like to know who are the rightful owners of it--why, those little nations, the bushmen. As for justice, she may well be painted blind, for the strongest arm turns for scale, and she can't see to help herself. It is the same everywhere. We left the Government in England riding rough-shod over the poor starving devils, and when the worms began to turn, the law, as they call it, crushed them with its iron heel. The lion of England is a mighty fine fellow to boast of, but wherever he stalks, he leaves the traces of his bloody paws. They are beginning to find this out at home. Home!--it is no home to us." Gray heaved a deep sigh. "They are getting sick of being taxed for those hired assassins, the soldiers. I was one of those to show the people what they were taxed for--to pay men for shooting them like dogs, if they complained of wrong. I did not conceal from them that I had been a soldier myself and I pointed out the slavery of such a condition. I was licenced to talk of what I had been. I might have been pulled up and shown up, for I had got into a few scrapes from want of money; but this would have dragged forward some respectable names, so justice was deaf, as well as blind, on this question, and Jasper Lee was only talked of as a Chartist leader. The real traitors to the cause were those who sat safely at their desks in dusty offices, and made promises which gained them popularity at the time, but which they never intended to perform. One wrote, `If Jasper Lee leaves the B--D--dock in a felon's van, it shall be over a hurdle of Chartists' bodies.' Another, that if I `did not walk a free man from my gaol--free by the verdict of a British jury--thousands of armed citizens were ready to fling back the defiance I should hurl from the felon's dock.' One party `resolved,' that the vessel carrying off Jasper Lee, as a convict, should have to cleave its way through an ocean of Chartist blood,--`and,' shouted another from a platform at a hill-side meeting in one of the manufacturing districts, `so long as I live, the manacle will not be forged that will encircle the heel, or the scissors that will cut a hair from the head of Jasper Lee, the felon.'