do pretty much as they
like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any
such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a
clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a
cheerful man: perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom taken
exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk
abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we
must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the
worst rich--who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere
sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung
up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood
begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of
a too craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of
drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one
edge drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other
darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of
the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us
who have got sense, decency, and instruction have need to watch. That
these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent
disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not
believe; but wretched calamities must come from the very beginning of
such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which
the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion
of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have
all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage
beast in the breasts of our generation--that we do not help to poison the
nation's blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We
know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way--that oppression
has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression.
But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance,
and shape our means more and more reasonably toward the least harmful,
and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show
that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober
determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means.
And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood
tha