"Do you suppose, if my business calls me to London," said he, "and that the laws allow me, an American citizen, to travel on an English vessel that I'm going to keep off that ship? It has a legal right to carry me. Of course they can come aboard and see if that ship has contraband and guns, and if they find them they can take me off; but they can't blow her up until they have me safe. That's all they can do under the law, and that they have got to do. I'm going to travel wherever the law says I may."
Thus Captain Billy put it at the War Board, in his grocery, and even at home, where Mrs. Captain Billy, who always took him literally, said, with a flutter, "William, you must keep off those ships, even if you have the right to go on them. You will only make trouble if you insist on going to London now."
And in this insistence there were others in Sabinsport who agreed with Mrs. Captain Billy. There was the Rev. Mr. Pepper, as I have already explained. There was the dwindling Peace Party. There was a small number of Socialists in the mills. But they made only a ripple on the surface of that staid, settled conviction in Sabinsport's mind--"where we have a right to go, we're going to go, and Germany shall not stop us."
It was this conviction, so strong in Sabinsport, that made her pick out of the President's diplomatic correspondence two words, and all through the discussion cling to them. He had said "strict accountability" at the start, Sabinsport agreed, and she was willing to wait and stand on that. "Fine"--"Just right"--"Don't give 'em a loophole," was the average opinion. Of course there were those in Sabinsport, though they were very few, that were, like Mr. Kinney, the pillar in Dick's church, who had found Belgium's resistance "impractical," and who now argued that the trouble with the President's correspondence was that it did not give us "a leg to run on." "We don't want war," said Vestryman Kinney. "Diplomacy consists in so framing your notes that you have a way out. Suppose Germany won't agree, we must back down. It looks bad to me. He ought to have been more skillful."
In all this discussion, however, Dick saw that ingrained deeply in Sabinsport was the idea that keeping peace was a preëminent national duty. He found in the heart of the town a solemn conviction that a country ought to have a machinery that would keep its people out of war, that when things went wrong with other nations there ought to be a way to settle them without fighting. Although he felt that anger over the _Lusitania_--and perhaps something more serious for Germany than anger, that was contempt for the act--stayed and increased in the town, he knew that she clung to the conviction that there ought to be a better way than force to settle it. Sabinsport felt and argued very much as she felt and argued about the attempts in a neighboring State where lynchings sometimes occurred--that the punishment should be left to the law and not to a mob. To rush in now, as Captain Billy demanded, seemed to Sabinsport a little bit like mob action. She wanted a government that had a machinery to take care of such a task as this without forcing her to leave her honest business of earning a living to take up the abominable business of destroying men. She had an idea that we had a machinery for just this purpose. The question was, Would it work?