i8o CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS
diction, by the Eternal ! When the United States Mail is robbed and citizens murdered !" ^^ shouted the presi- dent. But Stephens was ready to be murdered himself rather than give up a principle. Why should not others be ? I really believe he would have preferred being torn to pieces by a mob to having that mob repressed by troops illegally. This is fine, but is perhaps carrying in- tellectualism rather far.
So after the war. He was ready to accept the result and to work loyally for the future. But he could not give up the principle — never. And he wrote his immense, two-volume book — dialogued, thoroughly Platonic, thoroughly intellectual, in which, as in Plato, men of straw are set up to be bowled over by masterly dialectic — a learned book, an awe-inspiring book, as dead as a volume of eighteenth-century sermons.
In short, he was an idealist, an ideologue. Napoleon would have said, who would have introduced reason into this chaos of unreason, this curious and fascinating in- ferno, which we call life. Because life would not heed him he resented it, but in the gentlest and most aflec- tionate fashion, returning good for evil in every way he knew.
In the political world, where he figured most, he seems to have been pitifully ineffectual. We saw in the case of Benjamin that the lack of deep and heartfelt convictions, a shallow opportunism, prevented the man from mak- ing any distinguished mark on the history of his time.
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