I said at the beginning and I say again, I believe that in every one of
us all things are germinal: in judge and prosecutor and prison-keeper
too, and even in those small moral souls who cut out one undeviating
pattern for all men to fit, even in them there are the germs of passion
and crime and sympathy and forgiveness. And some day things will stir in
them and accuse them and awaken them. And that awakening will come when
suddenly one day there breaks upon them with realizing force the sense
of the unison of life, the irrevocable relationship of the saint to the
sinner, the judge to the criminal; that all personalities are
intertwined and rushing upon doom together. Once in my life it was given
to me to see the outward manifestation of this unison. It was in 1897.
We stood upon the base of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square. Below
were ten thousand people packed together with upturned faces. They had
gathered to hear and see men and women whose hands and limbs were
scarred all over with the red-hot irons of the tortures in the fortress
of Montjuich. For the crime of an unknown person these twenty-eight men
and women, together with four hundred others, had been cast into that
terrible den and tortured with the infamies of the inquisition to make
them reveal that of which they knew nothing. After a year of such
suffering as makes the decent human heart sick only to contemplate, with
nothing proven against them, some even without trial, they were suddenly
released with orders to leave the country within twenty-four hours. They
were then in Trafalgar Square, and to the credit of old England be it
said, harlot and mother of harlots though she is, for there was not
another country among the great nations of the earth to which those
twenty-eight innocent people could go. For they were paupers
impoverished by that cruel State of Spain in the terrible battle for
their freedom; they would not have been admitted to free America. When
Francesco Gana, speaking in a language which most of them did not
understand, lifted his poor, scarred hands, the faces of those ten
thousand people moved together like the leaves of a forest in the wind.
They waved to and fro, they rose and fell; the visible moved in the
breath of the invisible. It was the revelation of the action of the
Unconscious, the fatalistic unity of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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