But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle in the Wilderness.
If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppression of the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings back all the problems of the present.

Here I only sketch these groups as I first found them in the present; and it must be remembered that my present is already past.

All this was before the latest change from military to civil government, but the mere name of Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstood in relation to that change itself.

Many of our journalists, especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots, wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarism to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism.

I think this a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly very much up to date, and actually very much behind the times.
As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is thinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army.
Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in the narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened type of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war, but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics or literature.