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 takes 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 towards 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 would 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 towards
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 w