Mr. Ansdell was neither impeccable nor omniscient. There was much in both his theories and his practice which would not commend itself to the moral statutes of the age; he attempted no defense, being incredulous as to the right of criticism upon personal predilections. But he had a flaming wrath, a consuming, intolerant contempt, for men who were unable to distinguish between private tastes and public duty. On this subject of public duty he was so strenuous, so deeply earnest, that often there seemed but a microscopic line between his attitude and fanaticism. But this zeal had its magnificent uses. Often it swayed despite themselves the politicians of his party who had least in common with him, and who disliked him and vaunted their conventional superiority to him even while they were being swept along toward nobler purposes than their own small souls could ever have conceived, in the current of feeling which his devotion had created. He took complete possession of Seth’s mind, and he worked wonders upon it. There is neither room here, nor power, to analyze these achievements. The young man, heretofore through circumstances slow and mechanical, revealed under the inspiration of this contact his true temperament. He became as receptive as a sensitized plate in the camera. He seemed to take in facts, theories, emotions, prejudices, beliefs, through the very pores of his skin. He found himself hating one line of public action, and all its votaries, vividly; he found himself thrilling with violent enthusiasm for another line, and its exponents--such an enthusiasm as exiled men tremble under when they hear the national air of their native land. He was not always right. Very often indeed he did injustice, in his mind, and in the types as well, to really well-meaning men who after their lights were just as patriotic as he was. He condemned with undue ferocity where he could not unreservedly praise, and, like most men of three-and-twenty who sit on the tripod of judgment upon their fellow mortals, he made many mistakes. But his mental and moral advance, despite these limitations, was tremendously swift, and, in the main, substantial. No man ever made the world budge an inch ahead who had not well developed the capacity for indignation at weak and wrong things. This indignant faculty grew and swelled in Seth’s nature like a strong vine, spreading upon the tree of his admiration for his ideals.