United States -- National Guard -- Juvenile fiction
“You do not need so closely to question him!” he exclaimed. “I know
him. He is safe. He believes in the solidarity of labor the world over.
His sympathies, they are with our men in this struggle for the human
rights. Is it not so, Lieutenant?”
“It is decidedly so,” replied Hal.
“And he will that way interpret his duty as officer to do least injury
to us, his brothers. Is it not so, Lieutenant?”
“That is correct,” replied Hal. “I do not intend to fail in the
performance of my duty in any quarter.”
Donatello turned toward his guests with a wide sweep of his hands.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “with that we must be content.”
But it was an hour later, after much discussion of economic problems,
and the methods by which they were to be solved, that Chick unlocked
the door and let Lieutenant McCormack out into the street. And neither
of them saw the figure of a man patiently waiting in a dark recess two
doors away, a man who had seen all of Donatello’s guests arrive, and
who was waiting to see them all depart.
Later on, as Hal thought over his visit to the printing shop, he felt
that he had said nothing that he did not fully believe, that he had
made no promise either of action or inaction that he did not stand
ready to fulfil. It was very true that his sympathies were with the
working class of men. He seconded all their efforts for their own
betterment. He felt that some day labor, united, harmonious, acting in
concert, under one leadership the world over, would move its enormous
body, would rise, tremble, stretch itself like some great giant, and
in the process would upheave society; and that out of the tumult and
confusion and wreckage would arise a new social order in which every
man would be the equal of every other man in all things material and
immaterial with which a beneficent Creator had endowed them. It was a
dream, perhaps. Donatello had dreamed it. His two visitors had dreamed
it. A hundred thousand men with toil-hardened hands, under the shadow
of the Stars and Stripes, had dreamed it. Countless millions in the old
world, under the iron heel of autocracy, had died dreaming it. Yet,
some day, notwithstanding the natural perverseness of the human heart,
the dream was bound to come true. So the dreamers believed; so they
taught, and to that end they struggled and fought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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