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Crisis, the — Volume 03 by Winston Churchill
page 47 of 78 (60%)

Stephen now trembled for his champion. He tried to think of himself as
fifty years old, with the courage to address sixteen thousand people on
such a day, and quailed. What a man of affairs it must take to do that!
Sixteen thousand people, into each of whose breasts God had put different
emotions and convictions. He had never even imagined such a crowd as this
assembles merely to listen to a political debate. But then he remembered,
as they dodged from in front of the horses, what it was not merely a
political debate: The pulse of nation was here, a great nation stricken
with approaching fever. It was not now a case of excise, but of
existence.

This son of toil who had driven his family thirty miles across the
prairie, blanketed his tired horses and slept on the ground the night
before, who was willing to stand all through the afternoon and listen
with pathetic eagerness to this debate, must be moved by a patriotism
divine. In the breast of that farmer, in the breast of his tired wife who
held her child by the hand, had been instilled from birth that sublime
fervor which is part of their life who inherit the Declaration of
Independence. Instinctively these men who had fought and won the West had
scented the danger. With the spirit of their ancestors who had left their
farms to die on the bridge at Concord, or follow Ethan Allen into
Ticonderoga, these had come to Freeport. What were three days of bodily
discomfort! What even the loss of part of a cherished crop, if the
nation's existence were at stake and their votes might save it!

In the midst of that heaving human sea rose the bulwarks of a wooden
stand. But how to reach it? Jim was evidently a personage. The rough
farmers commonly squeezed a way for him. And when they did not, he made
it with his big body. As they drew near their haven, a great surging as
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