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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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“Why didn’t you?” said Miss Ophelia;- “you ought not to put your hand to the plough, and look back.” “O, well, things didn’t go with me as I expected, and I got the despair of liv- ing that Solomon did. I suppose it was a necessary incident to wisdom in us both; but, somehow or other, instead of being actor and regenerator in society, I became a piece of driftwood, and have been floating and eddying about, ever since. Al- fred scolds me, every time we meet; and he has the better of me, I grant,- for he really does something; his life is a logical result of his opinions, and mine is a contemptible non sequitur.” “My dear cousin, can you be satisfied with such a way of spending your pro- bation?” “Satisfied! Was I not just telling you I despised it? But, then, to come back to this point,- we were on this liberation business. I don’t think my feelings about slavery are peculiar. I find many men who, in their hearts, think of it just as I do. The land groans under it; and, bad as it is for the slave, it is worse, if anything, for the master. It takes no spectacles to see that a great class of vicious, improvident, degraded people, among us, are an evil to us, as well as to themselves. The capitalist and aristocrat of England cannot feel that as we do, because they do not mingle with the class they degrade as we do. They are in our houses; they are the associates of our children, and they form their minds faster than we can; for they are a race that children always will cling to and assimilate with. If Eva, now, was not more angel than ordinary, she would be ruined. We might as |
