“You must remember we are passing through the embryonic stage now,” said Mr. Clare, “though, I confess, I should have liked a few particulars of our chipping the shell, and just how we looked when we first came out.” “Ah! there you put your finger on the weak point. He insists that the shell was _chipped_, not cut by the sword; and I don’t see the slightest possibility of that.” “One never does till the hour strikes.” “The hour!” said Father McClosky, “sure, it’s the hour and the Man, too, that we want. Where’s the Man?” “Perhaps not yet born,” said Ernest Clare, smiling; “perhaps a baby in his mother’s arms; perhaps a schoolboy, studying the Monroe Doctrine and parsing the Declaration of Independence; perhaps working at some trade or profession: guiding the plough, like Cincinnatus; surveying his native land, like Washington; or practising law, like Abraham Lincoln.” “You are very sanguine,” said Dr. Richards, between a smile and a sigh; “I wish I were half so much so. But, whatever I might wish, I don’t venture to hope for the establishment of a Commune, at least in my time or without violence. It doesn’t seem to me at all a practicable idea.” “The abolition of slavery was not practicable, Dr. Richards; it was simply _done_.” “And done by the sword, Mr. Clare. Although you never argue, you will be able to remember, perhaps,” said the doctor, smiling, “that I don’t dispute the possibility of establishing, by violence, a Commune that should be as short-lived as those Parisian affairs.” “Our own Republic was founded by the sword,” said Alice. “But with a difference, and in different times,” returned the clergyman. “One must always take one’s century into account, you know; though in any age it is lawful and right to kick a man out who has broken into one’s house. But, as to slavery, do you call the negro question a settled one?” “Well, they are legally their own masters, but whether they are better off in essentials is an open question.” “Some day, Dr. Richards, take up some thoughtful history which you already know pretty thoroughly, and read it with this question in your mind, ‘Is any question ever so decided by the sword as to leave everybody better off all round?’ Isn’t there always a residuum of evil to somebody—and usually to everybody—caused by the very means used to effect a cure?” “Just as the homœopaths say of allopathic remedies,” interposed Alice roguishly; “one must recover from the disease first, and the medicine afterwards.” “Passing over that slur on my profession, which I scorn to notice,” said the doctor, with a disdainful glance at his wife, “I agree with you entirely, Mr. Clare; but might not one say the same of everything else in the world, besides war and allopathy? Is not the true reading of the curse laid on Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and it shall not agree with thee after thou eatest it’?”