She returned with
a piece of paper in her hand. It was thin and blackened with close
handwriting. It was obviously a letter.
"I wanted to read you the very words," she said. "This is one of my poor
brother's letters. He never doubted. How could he doubt? They make only
such a small handful, these miserable oppressors, before the unanimous
will of our people."
"Your brother believed in the power of a people's will to achieve
anything?"
"It was his religion," declared Miss Haldin.
I looked at her calm face and her animated eyes.
"Of course the will must be awakened, inspired, concentrated," she went
on. "That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up
one's life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must
be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to
reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are
only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful of cruel--perhaps
blind--officials against a nation."
The letter rustled slightly in her hand. I glanced down at the
flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic,
incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.
"Stated like this," I confessed, "the problem seems simple enough. But I
fear I shall not see it solved.
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