"You've got to take such things to hum to realize 'em," sez I. "Owin' to a sweet mother and a good father your boy mebby is safe. But spozein' he wuzn't, spozein' you and his sweet ma had to look on as millions of other pas and mas have to and see his handsome, manly young face growin' red, dissipated, brutal; his light, gay young heart changed to a demon's, and from bein' your chief pride you had to hide him out of sight like the foul and loathsome leper he had become. Millions of other pas and mas that love their boys as well as you love yours have to do this. And if it wuz your boy what would you say of the legalized crime that made him so? Wouldn't you turn the might of your great strength aginst it?"
He didn't speak out loud, but I see from his looks that he would. "Then," sez I, "do, do think of other pas and mas and sisters and sweethearts and wives weepin' and wailin' for husbands, sons and brothers slain by this enemy! I spoze," sez I reasonably, "that you think it is an old story and monotonous, but Love is an old story and Grief and Death, but they are jest as true as at the creation and jest as solemn." I thought he looked a good deal convinced, but he looked as if he wuz thinkin' of the extreme difficulty of reachin' and vanquishin' this foe intrenched as it is in the lowest passions of men, hidin' behind the highest legal barriers and barricaded behind meetin' house doors, guarded by the ballots of saint and sinner; I read these thoughts on his forehead, and answered 'em jest as if he'd spoke.
Sez I, "When your illustrious father come up face to face with a foe no other general could manage, did he flinch and draw back because it had been called onmanageable by everybody else? No, he drawed a line between good and evil, black and white, and says, 'I'll fight it right out on this line.' And he did, and before his courage and bravery and persistence the foe fell. Now, Frederic, here is the biggest foe that the American people are facin' to-day; here are weak generals and incompetent ones. Nobody can manage it; them high in authority wink at it and dassent tackle it, and so on down through all the grades of society--Church and State--they dassent touch it. And what is the burnin'est shame, them that ort to fight it support it with all the political and moral help they can give it. Here is a chance, Frederic, for you to do tenfold more for your country's good than ever your revered father did, and you know and I know that if it wasn't for this great evil and a few others, such as the big Trusts and a few other things, our country is the greatest and best that the sun ever shone on. If we loved our country as we ort to we would try to make her do away with these evils and stand up perfect under the heavens. It is the ma that loves her child that spanks her into doin' right if she can't coax her, and now do lay hold and help your country up onto the highest pedestal that a country ever stood on, and I'll help boost all I can." I hearn behind me a loud "amen," turned into a cough. Arvilly wuzn't to blame; it spoke itself onbeknown to her.