conviction…. And we always come back with hell in our eyes! Why, Major?… Why, because you false, lying, greedy, selfish, and hypocritical old men of the world have lied to us…. You always lie to us. And how, Major, in what way do you lie to us?… Why, Major,” he said solemnly, “you tell us that war is beautiful, ideal, and heroic—that we are going forth to fight for pure ideals, noble faith…. And what do we find, Major? Why,” he said, as his voice sank to an ironically solemn whisper—“we find that war is really ugly—is really cruel—horrible—base…. Why, Major, do you know what we young men find when we go to war? We find that men in war actually kill one another…. Yes, sir,” he would whisper solemnly, “… they shoot one another—they blow one another’s brains out—that’s what they do—why, it’s murder, Major—sheer cold-blooded murder—it’s not what you said it was at all—and all of it because you old greedy, lying, selfish men who make the wars have lied to us and tr-r-ricked us all along!”
“Ah, my boy,” the old “Major” would answer sorrowfully—“it is a grievous charge you make against us—but I fear—I fear,” here his voice would sink to a dejected whisper—“I fear that it is just.”
In this way, a telling and satiric irony was derived from this scene, which was well handled and might have been effective on the stage.
But the most effective scene of all, perhaps, was in the prologue of this play: here the scene was really splendid, thrilling in its dramatic pageantry, and undoubtedly would have been a very good and moving one upon a stage. The scene was on a hill and showed the building of the great white house—really the founding of a whole society. Before the unfinished house, a gun held cocked and ready in his hands, was standing the stern and silent figure of its founder. And before him, up and down the hill, and in and out of the unfinished house, and past its great unfinished columns, were moving two silent and unceasing files of slaves, powerful black men stripped naked to the waist, bearing upon their heads the heavy burdens of material that would go into the house. And from the house there comes a sound of constant hammering, and night comes, there are the flares of watchfires and the swift and cat-like passing of the great black forms. A moment’s flare of insurrection, the spring of a great negro at the stern and lonely figure of the man, the flash of a knife, and the rebel falls, knocked senseless by a blow from the stock of the master’s gun.
Then, another white man from the neighbouring town—the minister: the
