And so he stood there, in the club room, and she still looking at him, as she had done that morning, when, as a little girl, she listened to his life story. He grit his teeth, and he would always—
"In, by four hundred and twenty-seven," the shout came from those near to the telephone.
"Four hundred and twenty-seven," the shout of triumph rolled from side to side.
His wife gripped his hand: "The election is yours."
"No," he replied, huskily, "it is yours."Her eyes were shining with the glory of success.
In Defense of Honor
A Declamation
"Do you hear, mother? My comrades call me!"
His eyes flashed with enthusiasm, and determination shook his young body; but his aged mother held him in her embrace and would not let him go.
"The Cossacks, the Cossacks! You will be killed, my boy! What shall I do without you?" she murmured.
"Life is not all, mother," he assured her. "I may die, but in this death I shall make you proud. You have feared death too much; and what have you gained? When my father perished, were you proud of his death? When you pass through the city of the Pale, do you feel that in his death, at least, he had a moment of which we may boast to our neighbors? Have you erected a monument over his grave to show his children that their father also lived and died like other men? No, mother, you weep in secret and your tears water affliction at its roots; and his death has left no courageous hope in your heart; has left nothing but desolation and despair. In his home, we children knew him to be kind and pious and brave, the honored head of our family; yet, when we grew older and saw him in the market-place among men not of our race, where he too should have been brave, what honor was left for him
when we knew he walked the streets of our native city with head down, afraid to look his neighbors in the face? What honor was left for him when we saw him hemmed in on all sides by ignoble laws, treated like a pariah, and finally attacked by a mob, and offering no resistance, no defense of his rights as a man? What honor was left for him when we saw him weakly ground down under the boot-heels of an ignorant, cruel rabble, who made of him, our father, fit game for sport? There was no honor for him, mother, nothing but compassion and pity for his weakness, for what has he left us for a heritage but ignominy and degradation?
"And, mother, think of him who has left us to die in Manchuria. My brother, our beloved Joseph, responded to the call of the tyrant and donned the uniform of the Russian soldiery and went out to that far-away country to fight the battles of this very government which disgraces his people. What honor is left for him? Do we not know that his bones will whiten the plains of Manchuria, and that he has left us, his kindred, defenseless, open at any moment to be set upon and treated like outcasts; and does he not know, out there, that he will die, not for us, not in defense of our honor, nor to raise the name of the Jew