h fidelity carried beyond the balance of a harmony of
interests, results in an insensibility to moral accountability. Thus in
the Southern States, masters often refer with pride to the fact that a
certain negro, who will freely pillage in other quarters, will 'never
steal at home.' History shows that the man who surrenders himself
entirely to the will of another begins at once to cast on his superior
all responsibility for his own acts. Such dependence and evasion is of
itself far worse than the bold unbelief which is to the last degree
self-reliant; which seeks no substitute, dreads no labor, scorns all
mastery, and aims at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. Such unbelief may possibly end in finding religious truth after
its devious errors, but what shall be said of those who would have men
sin as _slaves_?

Singularly and appropriately allied to a resignation of moral
accountability from feudal attachment, is the contemptible and cowardly
doctrine of fatalism, which Dryfesdale also professes. It is not with
him the philosophic doctrine of the concurring impulses of circumstance,
or of natural laws, but rather the stupendously nonsensical notion of
the Arabian _kismet_, that from the beginning of time every event was
fore-arranged as in a fairy tale, and that all which _is_, is simply the
acting out of a libretto written before the play began--a belief revived
in the last century by readers of Leibnitz, who were truer than the
great German himself to the consequences of his doctrine, which he
simply evaded.[15] In coupling this humiliating and superstitious means
of evading moral accountability with the same principle as derived from
feudal devotion, Scott, consciously or unconsciously, displayed genius,
and at the same time indirectly attacked that system of society to which
he was specially devoted. So true is it that genius instinctively tends
to set forth the _truth_, be the predilections of its possessor what
they may. And indeed, as Scott nowhere shows in any way that _he_, for
his part, regarded the blind fidelity of the steward as other than
admirable, it may be that he was guided rather by instinct than will, in
thus pointing out the great evil resulting from a formally aristocratic
state of society. Such as it is, it is well worth studying in these
times, when the principles of republicanism and aristocracy are brought
face to face at war among us, firstly in the contest between the South