He didn't get over it. It was an emotional crisis. He left home with a conflict in his mind,--a conflict between his affection for you and that which he had suddenly come to see was right. I mean, right for today, for the year and hour in which we are living. This question of the emancipation of labour began a hundred years ago, with the introduction of machinery and the rise of modern industry, and in this war it has come to a head. Well, as the time approached for George to risk his life for his new beliefs, his mental conflict deepened. He talked with other young men who believed they were fighting for the same cause. And then--it must have been shortly before he was wounded--he wrote you that appeal. (ASHER: The letter I read to you!) The fact that in his own home, in the shops which bore his name, no attempt had been made to meet the new issues for which he was going into battle, weighed upon him. Then came the shell that shattered his body. But the probabilities are that he was struck down, unconscious, at the very moment when the conflict in his mind was most acute. He was thinking of you, of the difference you and he had had, he was lonely, he was afraid for the bravest men feel fear. To him the bursting of the shell was the bursting of the conflict within him. I won't go into the professional side of the matter, the influence of the mental state on the physical--but after the wound healed, whenever anything occurred to remind him of the conflict,--a letter from you, the sight of the strikers this afternoon at the shops, meeting you once more, a repetition came of what happened when the shell struck him. Certain glands fail in their functions, the heart threatens to stop and put an end to life. If my theory is correct, what I have given him may tide over that danger, but only on one condition can he continue to live and become a useful member of society. (ASHER: What condition?) That the mental conflict, the real cause of the trouble, he resolved. The time has come, Asher, when you must make your choice between your convictions and your son.

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