ely by photography. Of
the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the
thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and
their accompanying hosts--what do they yet so much as care to know?

"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the
great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself;
of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its
parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you
may, by holding the mirror to it."

71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many
a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose,
of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the
glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on
this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily
and guiltlessly won.

Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary
corsair--set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve.
Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated
prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able
to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he
will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has
heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not
therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he
take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due
salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow
prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it--become the
smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding--how then? Of
all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the
simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it!
Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it
complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave
or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished
Bondsman.

72. And gravely I say that I know _no_ captivity so sorrowful as that of
an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the
finest gifts--of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to
be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of
speakers and writers, but they only se