e. But now they crush me into the very dust.
I take an interest in the struggles of the slave for his freedom; I
express my opinions as if I myself were a free man; and they threaten
to starve me and my children if I dare so much as speak or think."

I expressed my indignant sympathy in a few broken sentences; and he went
on with kindling animation:--

"Yes, they would fain crush me into the very dust! They cannot forgive
me, that, being born a man, I should walk erect according to my nature.
Mean-spirited and despicable themselves, they can tolerate only the
mean-spirited and the despicable; and were I not so entirely in their
power, Mr. Lindsay, I could regard them with the proper contempt. But
the wretches can starve me and my children--and they _know_ it; nor does
it mend the matter that I _know_ in turn, what pitiful, miserable,
little creatures they are. What care I for the butterflies of
to-night?--they passed me without the honour of their notice; and I, in
turn, suffered them to pass without the honour of mine; and I am more
than quits. Do I not know that they and I are going on to the fulfilment
of our several destinies?--they to sleep, in the obscurity of their
native insignificance, with the pismires and grasshoppers of all the
past, and I to be whatever the millions of my unborn countrymen shall
yet decide. Pitiful little insects of an hour! what is their notice to
me! But I bear a heart, Mr. Lindsay, that can feel the pain of treatment
so unworthy; and I must confess it moves me. One cannot always live upon
the future, divorced from the sympathies of the present. One cannot
always solace one's self under the grinding despotism that would
fetter one's very thoughts, with the conviction, however assured, that
posterity will do justice both to the oppressor and the oppressed. I am
sick at heart; and were it not for the poor little things that depend so
entirely on my exertions, I could as cheerfully lay me down in the grave
as I ever did in bed after the fatigues of a long day's labour. Heaven
help me! I am miserably unfitted to struggle with even the natural evils
of existence--how much more so when these are multiplied and exaggerated
by the proud, capricious inhumanity of man!"

"There is a miserable lack of right principle and right feeling," I
said, "among our upper classes in the present day; but, alas for poor
human nature! it has ever been so, and, I am afraid, ever will. And
there is quite as much