Their very imagination was dead.

When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.
I rather wished I had gone some other road.

This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out a peaceful revolution in his mind.

For it could not help bringing up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must _begin_ in blood, whatever may answer afterward.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that.