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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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ful and deferential, but quite explicit, that over the house-servants she should be entire mistress, but that with the field-hands he could allow no interference. He re- vered and respected her above all living beings; but he would have said it all the same to the Virgin Mary herself, if she had come in the way of his system. “I used sometimes to hear my mother reasoning cases with him,- endeavoring to excite his sympathies. He would listen to the most pathetic appeals with the most discouraging politeness and equanimity. ‘It all resolves itself into this,’ he would say; ‘must I part with Stubbs, or keep him? Stubbs is the soul of punctual- ity, honesty, and efficiency,- a thorough business hand, and as humane as the gen- eral run. We can’t have perfection; and if I keep him, I must sustain his administration as a whole, even if there are, now and then, things that are excep- tionable. All government includes some necessary hardness. General rules will bear hard on particular cases.’ This last maxim my father seemed to consider a set- tler in most alleged cases of cruelty. After he had said that, he commonly drew up his feet on the sofa, like a man that has disposed of a business, and betook him- self to a nap, or the newspaper, as the case might be. “The fact is, my father showed the exact sort of talent for a statesman. He could have divided Poland as easily as an orange, or trod on Ireland as quietly and systematically as any man living. At last my mother gave up, in despair. It never will be known, till the last account, what noble and sensitive natures like hers have felt, cast, utterly helpless, into what seems to them an abyss of injustice and cruelty, and which seems so to nobody about them. It has been an age of long |
