Page:Arthur Stranger--The Stranger.djvu/11

Rh sacrifice, when your only need is a need of vision. For I see something more than a land of stately rivers and statelier plains. I see something more than crowded harbors and countless leagues of wheatland threaded with steel and fat farms and proud and stately cities where little more than a generation ago the wilderness lay. I see the lonely figures of Cabot and Cartier and Champlain threading its waterways, and La Verendrye and Radisson and Mackenzie, with wonder in their eyes, pushing deeper and deeper into the solitude and mystery of its prairies. I see a country that stretches half a world away, linking the Atlantic with the Pacific, a country in which the Roman Empire at its loftiest might easily be lost, numbing the mind with its magnitude, thrilling the very soul with its vistas of material splendor. But I see more than this. I see a nation purified by suffering and left nobler by loss, the loss of her happy dead who gave up their lives for an Idea, and an Idea which others must transmute into an Ideal. I see a people who have endured the test of disaster without flinching now facing the keener test of success, a nation that stood shoulder to shoulder before peril now called on to stand shoulder to shoulder before obligation. For I see its heroes to be rewarded, its wounded to be succoured, its homes to be builded, its ships to go voyaging forth into hungrier lands with the bread of life, its valleys of virgin loam to be opened up to its sons of adventure. I see it striving to weave its children up into the fabric of nationhood. I see it begging to make them partners in a prosperity which is their own if they will only accept it. I see it with its great tasks still uncompleted, asking, as I have said, not for sacrifice but for vision, proclaiming not its poverty but its right to reap the fruits of victory!" The eyes of the two men met, and still again that vague sense of uneasiness touched with humility took possession of the hard-headed man of business as he stared at the stranger with the light of exaltation on his colorless face. Hardy even sat speechless for a moment or two, with his hand on the wheel of his car.

"And what's all this to me?" he demanded, out of that prolonging silence, perplexed by the difficulty with which his ghostly resentments were finding their voice. "It sounds like very fine talk. But talk, after all, is talk, and I'm a man of action. I believe in doing things, instead of saying them. And I rather