“You were witness of the anxiety of our attempt to keep war and the talk of it far in the background,—­our desire to preserve the present state of peace.”

“Assuredly.  But, Sirs, you will forgive me,—­I do not believe peace will last.  I thought so, until this very day.  In my belief, now, there will be war.  It can not be averted.”

“We are glad to hear the belief of all, on all sides,” was the courteous rejoinder.  “We ourselves hope the compromise to be more nearly final.  Perhaps you as well as others hold to the so-called doctrine of the ‘higher law’?  Perhaps you found your politics in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise, rather than in the more sober words of our own Constitution?” His eyes were quizzical, yet not unkind.

“Certain doctrines seem to endure,” was her stout answer, kindling.  “I am but a woman, yet I take it that anything that I can say will have no value unless it shall be sincere.  To me, this calm is something which can not endure.”

“There at least do not lack others who are of that belief.  But why?”

“They told me in the West that the South has over three million slaves.  They told me that the labor of more than seven million persons, black and white, is controlled by less than a third of a million men; and of all that third of a million, less than eight thousand practically represent the owners of these blacks, who do not vote.  Gentlemen, I have been interested in the cause of democracy in Europe—­I do not deny it—­yet it seems to me an oligarchy and not a democracy which exists in the American South.  The conflict between an oligarchy and a natural democracy is ages old.  It does not die.  It seems to me that there is the end of all compromise—­in the renewed struggle of men, all over the world, to set up an actual government of their own,—­not an oligarchy, not a monarchy, not of property and wealth, but of actual democracy.  It must come, here, some day.”

“It is unusual, my dear lady, to find one of your sex disposed to philosophy so deep and clear as your own.  You please us.  Will you go on?”

“Sir, your courtesy gives me additional courage,”. was her answer.  “You have asked me for my beliefs—­and I do not deny that I have some of my own, some I have sought to put in practice.  To me, another phase of this question lies in something which the South itself seems not to have remembered.  The South figures that the cost of a laboring man, a slave, is perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars.  The South pays the cost of rearing that man.  Any nation pays the cost of bringing up a human being.  Yet, within this very year, Europe has sent into the North and into the West a third of a million of men already reared, already paid for.  Sir, you ask me what will be the result of this discontent, the result of this compromise.  It seems to me plainly written in those two facts—­industrial, not political