will be until we reach that pitch of universal luxury and sloth and
vice which extinguished Rome. Those commercial and financial pursuits
should make a man less a man is the very acme of absurdity. If our men
were drawn into a righteous war to-morrow or a hundred years hence,
they would fight to the glory of their country and their own honour.
But if they swagger out to whip a decrepit and wheezy old man, when
the excitement is over they will wish that the whole episode could be
buried in oblivion. And I would be willing to wager anything you like
that if this war does come off, so false is its sentiment that it will
not inspire one great patriotic poem, nor even one of merit, and that
the only thing you will accomplish will be to drag Cuba from the
relaxing clutches of one tyrant and fling her to a horde of
politicians and greedy capitalists."

But, except when politics possessed it, her brain seldom ceased, no
matter how crowded her environment, from pondering on the events of
the summer, and pondering, it sobered and grew older. She had engaged
in a conflict with the Unseen Forces of life and been conquered. She
had been obliged to stand by and see these forces work their will upon
a helpless being, who carried in solution the vices of civilizations
and men persisting to their logical climax, almost demanding aloud the
sacrifice of the victim to death that this portion of themselves might
be buried with her. Despite her intelligence, nothing else could have
given her so clear a realization of the eternal persistence of all
acts, of the sequential symmetrical links they forge in the great
chain of Circumstance. It was this that made her hope more eager that
the United States would be guided by its statesmen and not by
hysteria, and it was this that made her think deeply and constantly
upon her future relation with Senator North.