war; and the more noble,
having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and
embrace death. Strange enough, if, with their singular origin and
perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future
life; stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think
this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity.

I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at
large presents: of organized injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous
crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too
darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right.
But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that
all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching
and inspiriting that, in a field from which success is banished, our race
should not cease to labor.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a
thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight he
startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under
what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of
ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality: by camp-fires in
Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his
blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave
opinions like a Roman senator: in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship
and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a
bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that,
simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave
to drown for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future,
with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest
up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the
bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins
him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming
tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the
discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a
fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of
honor and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scrup