their brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They
will have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the
leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the
spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice
of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our
column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'
arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which
will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of
yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee for
the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he
apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right,
thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the
great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between that metal-
rail of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for
want of an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right was
Alvan, for those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he
counted on the supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished
where it lay in perpetuity.

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they
could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had
resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple
for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese;
he had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too
short for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels;
too valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the
shedding of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under,
fear not.

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he