Chapter IX: Part 9

For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental impossibility it should have gone in any other, and have said it times enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is thoroughly unmanageable. Then the baggage-master, in anguish of soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--

"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?"

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape. But Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity. She had eyes only for the trunk.

"Well," says Baggager, at his wits' end, "you let me take your check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes."

I pity him, and relax my clutch.

"No," whispers Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing. Keep that till you see your trunk."

My clutch re-tightens.

"At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't come back. You'll get to your journey's end just as soon."

"Shall I? Well, I will," compliant as usual.

"No," interposes my good genius again. "Men are always saying that a woman never goes when she engages to go. She is always a train later or a train earlier, and you can't meet her."

Pliant to the last touch I say aloud,--

"No, I must go in this train"; and so I go trunkless and crest-fallen to meet Halicarnassus.

It is a dismal day, and Crene, to comfort me, puts into my hands two books as companions by the way. They are Coventry Patmore's "Angel in the House," "The Espousals and the Betrothal." I do not approve of reading in the cars; but without is a dense, white, unvarying fog, and within my heart it is not clear sunshine. So I turn to my books.

Did any one ever read them before? Somebody wrote a vile review of them once, and gave the idea of a very puerile, ridiculous, apron-stringy attempt at poetry. Whoever wrote that notice ought to be shot, for the books are charming pure and homely and householdy, yet not effeminate. Critics may sneer as much as they choose: it is such love as Vaughan's that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather than culprits, coarse against their nature, hard, material, grasping, the saddest sight humanity can see. Such a woman can accept coarse men. They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be shocked. But women in the natural state want men to stand god-like erect, to tread majestically, and live delicately, Women do not often make an ado about this. They talk it over among themselves, and take men as they are. They quietly soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish them up, and make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut their eyes and make believe there isn't any worst, or reason it away,--a great deal more than I should think they would. But if you want to see the qualities that a woman, spontaneously loves, the expression, the tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her self-respect, that not only secures her acquiescence, but arouses her enthusiasm and commands her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read Coventry Patmore. Not that he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but this I do mean: that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor, his unfeigned inward humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire, there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you, but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be not deceived by her placability. "Here he is," she says to herself, "and something must be done about it. Buried under Ossa and Pelion somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug into, the sooner it will be exhumed." So she digs. She would never have made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made, such as you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great, sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not of sympathy. Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying, protesting love, and carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while the little brook that you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look down upon always,--the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and orchard and sweet wild-wood,--singing with the birds and the blooms songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars, singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and talk to you, and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,--you must bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry. That is just as much discrimination as you have. Tell you to be gentle, and you think we want you to dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness. No, Sir. You may make shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may blow the huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands grimed; and yet you may be a hero. And, on the other hand, you may write verses and be a clown. It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink of the ninefold Styx. The Israelites ate angels' food in the wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly glory. Come as the June morning comes. It has not picked its way daintily, passing only among the roses. It has breathed up the whole earth. It has blown through the fields and the barn-yards and all the common places of the land. It has shrunk from nothing. Its purity has breasted and overborne all things, and so mingled and harmonized all that it sweeps around your forehead and sinks into your heart as soft and sweet and pure as the fragrancy of Paradise. So come you, rough from the world's rough work, with all out-door airs blowing around you, and all your earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all things, blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness into the grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.

Thus I read and mused in the soft summer fog, and the first I knew the cars had stopped, I was standing on the platform, and Coventry and his knight were--where? Wandering up and down somewhere among the Berkshire hills. At some junction of roads, I suppose, I left them on the cushion, for I have never beheld them since. Tell me, O ye daughters of Berkshire, have you seen them,--a princely pair, sore weary in your mountain-land, but regal still, through all their travel-stain? I pray you, entreat them hospitably, for their mission is "not of an age, but for all time."

GIVE.

"The vine shall give her fruit, and the ground shall give her increase, and the heavens shall give their dew."

The fire of Freedom burns,
March to her altar now:
Bear on the sacred urns
Where all her sons must bow.

Woman of nerve and thought,
Bring in the urn your power!
By you is manhood taught
To meet this supreme hour.

Come with your sunlit life,
Maiden of gentle eye!
Bring to the gloom of strife
Light by which heroes die.

Give, rich men, proud and free,
Your children's costliest gem!
For Liberty shall be
Your heritage to them.

O friend, with heavy urn,
What offering bear you on?
The figure did not turn;
I heard a voice, "My son."

The fire of Freedom burns,
Her flame shall reach the heaven:
Heap up our sacred urns,
Though life for life be given!

ONLY AN IRISH GIRL!

"Oh, it's only an Irish girl!"

I flamed into a wrath far too intense for restraint. My whole soul rose up and cried out against the Deacon's wife. I answered,--

"True. A small thing! But are lies and murder small things, Mrs. Adams? Murderers, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie, are to be left outside of the heavenly city. And, Mrs. Adams, suppose it should appear that a woman of high respectability, moving in the best society, and most excellent housekeeper, has both those two tickets for hell? Do you remember the others that make up that horrible company in the last chapter of Revelation? Mrs. Adams, _the girl is_ DEAD!"

The Deacon's wife's hard face had blazed instantly into passionate scarlet. But I cared not for her, nor for man nor woman. For the words _said themselves_, and thrilled and sounded fearful to me also; they hurt me; they burnt from my tongue as melted iron might; and, scarcely knowing it, I rose up and emphasized with my forefinger. And her face, at those last four words, turned stony and whity-gray, like a corpse. I thought she would die. Oh, it was awful to think so, and to feel that she deserved it! For I did. I do now. For, reason as I will, I cannot help feeling as if a tinge of the poor helpless child's blood was upon my own garments. I do well to be angry. It is not that I desire any personal revenge. But I have a feeling,--not pleasure, it is almost all pity and pain,--but yet a feeling that sudden death or lingering death would be small satisfaction of justice upon her for what she rendered to another.

Her strong, hard, cruel nature fought tigerishly up again from the horrible blow of my news. She was frightened almost to swooning at the thing that I told and my denunciation, and the deep answering stab of her own conscience. But her angry iron will rallied with an effort which must have been an agony; her face became human again, and, looking straight and defiantly at me, she said, yet with difficulty,

"Ah! I'll see if my husband'll hev sech things said to me! That's all!"

And she turned and went straightway out of my house, erect and steady as ever.

It may seem a trifling story, and its lesson a trifling one. But it is not so,--neither trifling nor needless.

It is a rare thing, indeed, for a woman in this America to long and love to have children. The only two women whom I know in this large town who do are Mrs. O'Reilly, the mother of poor Bridget, and--one more.

Poor old Mrs. O'Reilly! She came to me this morning, and sat in my kitchen, and cried so bitterly, and talked in her strong Corkonian brogue, and rocked herself backwards and forwards, and shook abroad the great lambent banners of her cap-border,--a grotesque old woman, but sacred in her tender motherhood and her great grief. Her first coming was to peddle blackberries in the summer. I asked her if she picked them herself.

"Och thin and shure I've the childher to do that saam," said she. And what wonderful music must the voice of her youth have been! It was deep of intonation and heartfelt,--rich and smooth and thrilling yet, after fifty years of poverty and toil. "And id's enough of thim that's in id!" she added, with a curious air of satisfaction and reflectiveness.

"How many children have you?" I inquired.

She laughed and blushed, old woman though she was; and pride and deep delight and love shone in her large, clear, gray eyes.

"I've fourteen darlins, thank God for ivery wan of thim! And it's a purrty parthy they are!"

"Fourteen!" I exclaimed,--"how lovely!" I stopped short and blushed. My heart had spoken. "But how "--I stopped again.

The old blackberry-woman answered me with tears and smiles. What a deep, rich, loving heart was covered out of sight in her squalid life! It makes me proud that I felt my heart and my love in some measure like hers; and she saw it, too.

"An' it's yersilf, Ma'm, that has the mother's own heart in yez, to be sure! An' I can see it in your eyes, Ma'm! But it's the thruth it's mighty scarce intirely! I do be seein' the ladies that's not glad at all for the dear childher that's sint 'em, and sure it's sthrange, Ma'm! Indade, it was with the joy I did be cryin' over ivery wan o' me babies; and I could aisy laugh at the pain, Ma'm! And sure now it's cryin' I am betimes because I'll have no more!"

The dear, beautiful, dirty old woman! I cried and laughed with her, and I bought ten times as many blackberries as I wanted; and Mrs. O'Reilly and I were fast friends.

She and hers, her "ould man," her sons and her daughters, were thenceforth our ready and devoted retainers, dexterous and efficient in all manner of service, generous in acknowledging any return that we could make them; respectful and self-respectful; true men and women in their place, not unfit for a higher, and showing the same by their demeanor in a low one.

They came in and went out among us for a long time, in casual employments, until, with elaborate prefaces and doubtful apologetic circumlocutions, shyly and hesitatingly, Mrs. O'Reilly managed to prefer her petition that her youngest girl, Bridget, by name,--there were a few junior boys,--might be taken into my family as a servant. I asked the old woman a few questions about her daughter's experiences and attainments in the household graces and economies; could not remember her; thought I had seen all the "childher"; found that she had been living with Mrs. Deacon Adams, and had not been at my house. It was only for form's sake that I catechized; Bridget came, of course.

She was such a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,--slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger and more robust heartfeltness of tone,--and with the same, but shyer ways, and swift blushes and smiles. In one thing she differed: she was a silent, reticent girl: her tears were not so quick as her mother's, nor her words; she hid her thoughts. She had learned it of us secretive Americans, or had inherited it of her father, a silent, though cheery man.

Her glossy wealth of dark-brown hair, her great brown eyes, long eyelashes, sensitive, delicately cut, mobile red lips, oval face, beautifully formed arms and hands, and lithe, graceful, lady-like movements, were a sweet household picture, sunshiny with unfailing good-will, and of a dexterous neat-handedness very rare in her people. My husband was looking at her one day, and as she tripped away on some errand he observed,--

"She is a graceful little saint. All her attitudes are beatitudes."

Bridget was pure and devout enough for the compliment; and I had not been married so long but that I could excuse the evidence of his observation of another, for the sake of the neatness of his phrase. I should have thought the unconscious child incongruously lovely amongst brooms and dust-pans, pots and kettles, suds and slops and dishwater, had I not been about as much concerned among them myself.

Bridget had been with me only a day or two, when a friend and fellow-matron, in the course of an afternoon call, apprised me that there were reports that Bridget O'Reilly was a thief,--in fact, that she had been turned away by Mrs. Adams for that very offence, which she told me "out of kindness, and with no desire to injure the girl; but there is so much wickedness among these Irish!" She had heard this tale, through only one person, from Mrs. Adams herself.

This troubled me; yet I should have quickly forgotten it. I met the same story in several other directions within a few days; and now it troubled me more. Women are suspicious creatures. I don't like to confess it, but it is true. Besides, servants do sometimes steal. And little foreign blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty. Why should it? Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty and ignorance,--why should they tell the truth or respect property? Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural and necessary weapon of weakness. Their falsehood is their resistance, in the only form that weakness can use, evasion instead of force. Their theft is the taking of what is instinctively felt to be due; their gratification of an instinct after justice; done secretly because they have not the strength to demand openly. Such things are unnecessary in America, no doubt. But habits survive emigration. They are to be deplored, charitably and hopefully and tenderly cured as diseases, not attacked and furiously struck and thrust at as wild beasts. Thus it might be with Bridget, notwithstanding her great, clear, innocent eyes, and open, honest ways. If she had grown up to think such doings harmless, she would have no conscience about it. Conscience is very pliant to education. It troubles no man for what he is trained to do.

So I felt these stories. I could not find it in my heart to talk to poor Bridget about it. I could not tell her large-hearted old mother. This reluctance was entirely involuntary, an instinct. I wish I had felt it more clearly and obeyed it altogether! There is some fatal cloud of human circumstance that covers up from our sight our just instinctive perceptions,--makes us drive them out before the mechanical conclusions of mere reason; and when our reason, our special human pride, has failed us, we say in our sorrow, I see now; if I had only trusted my first impulse!--What is this cloud? Is it original sin? I asked my husband. He was writing his sermon. He stopped and told me with serious interest,--"This cloud is that original or inbred sin which we receive from Adam; obscuring and vitiating the free exercise of the originally perfect faculties; wilting them down, as it were, from a high native assimilation to the operative methods of the Divine Mind, to the painful, creeping, mechanical procedures of the comparing and judging reason. And this lost power is to be restored, we may expect, by the regenerating force of conversion."

I know I've got this right; because, after Henry had thanked me for my question, he said I was a good preaching-stock,--that the inquiry "joggled up" his mind, and suggested just what fayed in with his sermon; and afterwards I heard him preach it; and now I have copied it out of his manuscript, and have it all correct and satisfactory. What will he do to me, if he should see this in print? But I can't help it. And what is more, I don't believe his theological stuff. If it were true, there would not so many good people be such geese.

But whatever this cloud is, it now blinded and misguided me. I quietly, very quietly, put away some little moneys that lay about,--locked up nearly all my small stock of silver and my scanty jewelry,--locked my bureau-drawers,--counted unobtrusively the weekly proceeds of the washing,--and was extremely watchful against the least alteration of my manner towards my poor pretty maid.

It might have been a week after this, when my husband said one morning that Bridget's eyes were heavy, and she had moved with a start several times, as though she were half-asleep. Now that he spoke, I saw it, and wondered that I had not seen it before; but I think some men notice things more quickly than women. I asked the child if she were well.

"Yes, Ma'am," she said, spiritlessly, "but my head aches."

I observed her; and she dragged herself about with difficulty, and was painfully slow about her dishes. At tea-time I made her lie down in my little back parlor and got the meal myself, and made her a nice cup of tea. She slept a little, but grew flushed. Next morning she was not fit to get up, but insisted that she was, and would not remain in bed. But she ate nothing,--indeed, for a day or two she had not eaten,--and after breakfast she grew faint, and then more flushed than ever; seemed likely to have a hard run of fever; and I sent for my doctor,--a homoeopath.

He came, saw, queried, and prescribed. Doctor-like, he evaded my inquiry what was the matter, so that I saw it was a serious case. On my intimating as much, he said, with sudden decision,--

"I'll tell you what, Madam. She may be better by night. If not, you'd better send for Bagford. He might do better for her than I."

I was extremely surprised, for Bagford is a vigorous allopath of the old school, drastic, bloody,--and an uncompromising enemy of "that quack," as he called my grave young friend. I said as much. Doctor Nash smiled.

"Oh, I don't mind it, so long as the patients come to me. I can very well afford to send him one now and then. The fact is, the Irish must _feel_ their medicine. It's quite often that a raking dose will cure 'em, not because it's the right thing, but because it takes their imagination with it. The Irish imagination goes with Bagford and against me; and the wrong medicine with the imagination is better than the right one against it. I care more about curing this child than I do about him. Besides,"--and he grew grave,--"it may be no great favor to him."

I obliged him to tell me that he feared the attack would develop into brain-fever; and he said something was on the girl's mind. As soon as he was gone, I ran up to poor Bridget, whose sweet face and great brown eyes were kindled, in her increasing fever, into a hot, fearful beauty; and now I could see a steady, mournful, pained look contracting her mouth and lifting the delicate lines of her eyebrows. Poor little girl! I felt the same deep yearning sorrow which we have at the sufferings of a little child, who seems to look in scared wonder at us, as if to ask, What is this? and Why do you not help? When a child suffers, we feel a sense of injustice done. Bridget's lips were dry. Her skin was so hot, her whole frame so restless! And the silent misery of her eyes ate into my very heart. I smoothed her pillow and bathed her head, and would fain have comforted her, as if she had been my own little sister. But I could plainly see that my help was not welcome. When, however, I had done all that I could for her, I quietly told her that she was sick, and that I wanted to have her get well,--that I saw something was troubling her, and she must tell me what it was. I don't think the silent, enduring thing would have spoken even then, if she had not seen that I was crying. Her own tears came, too; and she briefly said,--

"You all think I'm a thief."

I assured her most earnestly to the contrary.

She turned her restless head over towards me again, and her great eyes, all glittering with fever and pain, searched solemnly into mine; and she replied,--

"You all think I'm a thief. Yis, I saw you had locked up the money and the silver. I saw you count the clane clothes that was washed in the house. Wouldn't I be after seein' it? And they says so in the town."

It went to my heart to have done those things. All that I could say was utterly in vain. She evidently _felt_ nothing of it to be true. She had received a deep and cruel hurt; and the poor, wild, half-civilized, shy, silent soul had not wherewith to reason on it. She only endured, and held her peace, and let the fire burn; and her sensitive nerves had allowed pain of mind to become severe physical disease. My words she scarcely heard; my tears were to her only sympathy. She knew what she had seen. Besides, her disease increased upon her. Almost from minute to minute she grew more restless, and her increasing inattention to what I said frightened as well as hurt me. The medicines of Dr. Nash were useless. Before noon I sent for Dr. Bagford, who said it was decidedly brain-fever,--that she must be leeched, and have ice at her head, and so forth.

Ah, it was useless. She grew worse and worse; passed through one or two long terrible days of frantic misery, crying and protesting against false accusations with a lamenting voice that made us all cry, too; then lay long in a stupid state, until the doctor said that now it would be better for her to die, because, after such an attack, a brain so sensitive would be disorganized,--she would be an idiot.

Her poor mother came and helped us wait on her. But neither care nor medicine availed. Bridget died; and the funeral was from our house. I was surprised by the lofty demeanor of Father MacMullen, the Irish priest, the first I had ever met: a tall, gaunt, bony, black-haired, hollow-eyed man, of inscrutable and guarded demeanor, who received with absolute haughtiness the courtesies of my husband and the reverences of his own flock. A few of his expressions might indicate a consciousness that we had endeavored to deal kindly with poor little Bridget. But he did not think so; or at least we know that he has so handled the matter that we meet ill feeling on account of it.

The griefs for any such misfortune were, however, obscure and shallow in comparison with my sorrow for the untimely quenching of Bridget's young life, and my sympathy with her poor old mother. When I reasoned about the affair, I could see that I had done nothing which would not be commended by careful housekeepers. I could see it, but, in spite of me, I could not feel it. I was tormented by vain wishes that I had done otherwise. I could not help feeling as if her people charged me with her blood,--as if I had been in some sense aiding in her death. Nor do I even now escape obscure returns of the same inexpressibly sad pain.

The garnishing of sepulchres is an employment which by no means went out with the Scribes and Pharisees. Under the circumstances, the death of my pretty young maid, although she was only an Irish girl, produced a deep impression in the village. Very soon, now that it could do no good, it was generally agreed that the imputations against her were wholly unfounded. It was pretty distinctly whispered that they had arisen out of things said by Mrs. Deacon Adams, in her wrath, because Bridget had left her service to enter mine; and I now ascertained that this Mrs. Adams was a woman of bitter tongue, and enduring, hot, and unscrupulous in anger and in revengefulness. I have inquired sufficiently; I know it is true. The vulgar malice of a hard woman has murdered a fair and good maiden with the invisible arrows of her wicked words.

But she begins already to be punished, coarse cast-iron as she is. People do not exactly like to talk with her. She is growing thin. She has been ill,--a thing, I am told, never dreamed of before. Of course she reported to her husband the reproaches with which I had surprised her on the very day of Bridget's death. She had called in by chance, and had not even heard of her illness; had herself begun to retail to me the kind of talk with which she had poisoned the village, not knowing that her evil work was finished; and it was the scornful carelessness of her reply to my first reproof that stung me to answer her so bitterly. It was two weeks before good, white-haired, old Deacon Adams came to the house of his pastor. His face looked careworn enough. He stayed long in the study with my husband, and went away sadly. I happened to pass through our little hall just as the Deacon opened the study-door to depart; and I caught his last words, very sorrowful in tone,--

"She might git well, ef she could stop dreamin' on't, and git the weight off 'm her mind. But words that's once spoken can't be called back as you call the cows home at night."

SHALL WE COMPROMISE?

In that period of remote antiquity when all birds of the air and beasts of the field were able to talk, it befell that a certain shepherd suffered many losses through the constant depredations of a wolf. Fearing at length that his means of subsistence would be quite taken away, he devised a powerful trap for the creature, and set it with wonderful cunning. He could hardly sleep that night for thinking of the matter, and early next morning took a stout club in his hand, and set forth to learn of his success; when, lo! on drawing near the spot, there he saw the wolf, sure enough, a huge savage, fast held in the trap.

"Ah," cried he, with triumph, "now I have got you!"

The wolf held his peace until the other was quite near, and then in a tone of the severest moral rebuke, and with a voice that was made quite low and grave with its weight of judicial reprehension, said,--

"Is it you, then? Can it be one wearing the form of a man, who has laid this wicked plot against the peace, nay, as I infer from that club, against the very life, of an innocent creature? Behold what I suffer, and how unjustly!--I, of all animals, whose life,--the sad state I am now in constrains me against modesty to say it,--whose life is notoriously a pattern of all the virtues;--I, too, ungrateful biped, who have watched your flock through so many sleepless nights, lest some ill-disposed dog might do harm to the helpless sheep and lambs!"

The shepherd, one of the simplest souls that ever lived, was utterly confounded by this reproof, and hung his head with shame, unable, for a season, to utter a word in his own defence. At length he managed to stammer,--

"I pray your pardon, brother, but--but in truth I have lost a great many lambs lately, and began to think my little ones at home would starve."

"How harder than stone is the heart of man!" murmured the wolf, as if to himself.

Then, raising his voice, he went on to say,--

"I despair of reaching your conscience; nevertheless I will speak as if I had hope. You never paid me anything for protecting your flock; it was on my part a pure labor of love; and yet, because I cannot quite succeed in guarding it against all the bad dogs that are about, you would take my life!"

And the creature put on such a look of meek suffering innocence that the shepherd was touched to the very heart, and felt more guilty and abashed than ever. He therefore said at once,--

"Brother, I fear that I have done you wrong; and if you will swear to mind your own affairs, and not prey upon my flock, I will at once set you free."

"My character ought to be a sufficient guaranty," answered the quadruped, with much dignity; "but I submit, since I must, to your unjust suspicions, and promise as you require."

So, lifting up his paw, he swore solemnly, by all the gods that wolves worship, to keep his pledge. Thereupon the other set him free, with many apologies and professions of confidence and friendship. Only a few days, however, had passed before the shepherd, happening to mount a knoll, saw at a little distance the self-same wolf eagerly devouring the warm remains of a lamb.

"Villain! villain!" he shouted, in great wrath, "is this the way you keep your oath? Did not you swear to mind your own business?"

"I am minding it," said the wolf, with a grin; "it is my business to eat lambs; it should be yours not to believe in wolves' promises."

So saying, he seized upon the last fragment of the Iamb, and ran away as fast as his legs would carry him.

_Moral_.--Shepherds who make compromises with wolves sell their mutton at an exceedingly cheap market.

Now just such short-witted shepherds are we, the people of these free American States, invited by numbers of citizens to become. Just such, do I say? A thousand times more silly than such. Our national wolf meets us with jaws that drip blood and eyes that glare hunger for more. Instead of professing sanctity and innocence, it only howls immitigable hate and steadfast resolution to devour. "Give me," it howls, "half the pasture and flock for my own, with, of course, a supervision over the rest, and a child or two when I am dainty; and I will be content,--until I want more!"

In speaking of our "national wolf," we are using no mere rhetoric, but are, in truth, getting at the very heart of the matter. This war, in its final relations to human history, is an encounter between opposing tendencies in man,--between the beast-of-prey that is in him and is always seeking brute domination, on the one hand, and the rational and moral elements of manhood, which ever urge toward the lawful supremacy, on the other. This is a conflict as old as the world, and perhaps one that, in some shape, will continue while the world lasts; and I have tried in vain to think of a single recorded instance wherein the issue was more simple, or the collision more direct, than in our own country to-day.

That principle in nature which makes the tiger tiger passes obviously into man in virtue of the fact that he is on one side, on the side of body and temperament, cousin to the tiger, as comparative anatomy shows. This presence in man of a tiger-principle does not occur by a mistake, for it is an admirable fuel or fire, an admirable generator of force, which the higher powers may first master and then use. But at first it assumes place in man wholly untamed and seemingly tameless, indisposed for aught but sovereignty. Of course, having place in man, it passes, and in the same crude state, into society. And thus it happens, that, when the unconquerable affinities of men bring them together, this principle arises in its brutal might, and strives to make itself central and supreme.

But what is highest in man has its own inevitable urgency, as well as what is lowest. It can never be left out of the account. Gravitation is powerful and perpetual; but the pine pushes up in opposition to it nevertheless. The forces of the inorganic realm strive with might to keep their own; but organic life _will_ exist on the planet in their despite, and will conquer from the earth what material it needs. And, in like manner, no sooner do men aggregate than there begin to play back and forth between them ideal or ascending forces, mediations of reason, conscience, soul; and the ever growing interpretations of these appear as courtesies, laws, moralities, worships,--as all the noble communities which constitute a high social state. In fine, there is that in man which seeks perpetually, for it seeks necessarily, to give the position of centrality in society to the ideal principle of justice and to the great charities of the human soul.

Hence a contest. Two antagonistic principles leap forth from the bosom of man, so soon as men come together, seeking severally to establish the law of social relationship. One of these is predaceous, brutal; the other ideal, humane. One says, "Might makes Right"; the other, "Might should serve Right." One looks upon mankind at large as a harvest to be gathered for the behoof of a few, who are confederate only for that purpose, even as wolves hunt in packs; the other regards humanity as a growth to be fostered for its own sake and worth, and affirms that superiority of strength is given for service, not for spoil. One makes the _ego_ supreme; the other makes rational right supreme. One seeks private gratification at any expense to higher values, even as the tiger would, were it possible, draw and drink the blood of the universe as soon as the blood of a cow; the other establishes an ideal estimate of values, and places private gratification low on the scale. But the deepest difference between them, the root of separation, remains to be stated. It is the opposite climate they have of man in the pure simplicity of his being. The predaceous principle says,--"Man is in and of himself valueless; he attains value only by position, by subduing the will of others to his own; and in subjecting others he destroys nothing of worth, since those who are weak enough to fall are by that very fact proved to be worthless." The humane or socializing principle, on the contrary, says,--"Manhood is value; the essence of all value is found in the individual soul; and therefore the final use of the world, of society, of action, of all that man does and of all that surrounds him, is to develop intelligence, to bring forth the mind and soul into power,--in fine, to realize in each the spiritual possibilities of man."

True socialization now exists only as this nobler principle is victorious. It exists only in proportion as force is lent to ideal relations, relations prescribed by reason, conscience, and reverence for the being of man,--only in proportion, therefore, as the total force of the state kneels before each individual soul, and, without foolish intermeddlings, or confusions of order, proffers protection, service, succor. Here is a socialization flowing, self-poised, fertilizing; it is full of gracious invitation to all, yet regulates all; it makes liberty by making law; it produces and distributes privilege. Here there is not only _community_, that is, the unity of many in the enjoyment of common privilege, but there is more, there is positive fructification, there is a wide, manifold, infinitely precious evocation of intelligence, of moral power, and of all spiritual worth.

As, on the contrary, the baser principle triumphs, there is no genuine socialization, but only a brute aggregation of subjection beneath and a brute dominance of egotism above. Society is mocked and travestied, not established, in proportion as force is lent to egotism. If anywhere the power which we call _state_ set its heel on an innocent soul,--if anywhere it suppress, instead of uniting intelligence,--if anywhere it deny, though only to one individual, the privilege of becoming human,--to such an extent it wars against society and civilization, to such extent sets its face against the divine uses of the world.

Now the contest between these opposing principles is that which is raging in our country this day. Of course, any broad territorial representation of this must be of a very mixed quality. Our best civilizations are badly mottled with stains of barbarism. In no state or city can egotism, either of the hot-blooded or cold-blooded kind,--and the latter is far the more virulent,--be far to seek. On the other hand, no social system, thank God, can quite reverse the better instincts of humanity; and it may be freely granted that even American slavery shades off, here and there, into quite tender modifications. Yet not in all the world could there possibly be found an antagonism so deep and intense as exists here. The Old World seems to have thrown upon the shores of the New its utmost extremes, its Oriental barbarisms and its orients and auroras of hope and belief; so that here coexist what Asia was three thousand years ago, and what Europe may be one thousand years hence. Let us consider the actual _status_.

In certain localities of Southern Africa there is a remarkable fly, the Tsetse fly. In the ordinary course of satisfying its hunger, this insect punctures the skin of a horse, and the animal dies in consequence. A fly makes a lunch, and a horse's life pays the price of the meal. This has ever seemed to me to represent the beast-of-prey principle in Nature more vigorously than any other fact. But in that system whose fangs are now red with the blood of our brave there is an expression of this principle not less enormous. It is the very Tsetse fly of civilization. That a small minority of Southern men may make money without earning it,--that a few thousand individuals may monopolize the cotton-market of the world,--what a suppression and destruction of intelligence it perpetrates I what consuming of spiritual possibilities! what mental wreck and waste! Whites, too, suffer equally with blacks. Less oppressed, they are perhaps even more demoralized. No parallel example does the earth exhibit of the sacrifice of transcendent values for pitiful ends.

In attempting to destroy free government and rational socialization in America, this system is treading no new road, it is only proceeding on the old. Its central law is that of destroying any value, however great, for the sake of any gratification, however small. Accustomed to battening on the hopes of humanity,--accustomed to taking stock in human degradation, and declaring dividends upon enforced ignorance and crime,--existing only while every canon of the common law is annulled, and every precept of morals and civilization set at nought,--could it be expected to pause just when, or rather just _because_, it had apparently found the richest possible prey? Could it be expected to withhold its fang for no other reason than that its fang was allured by a more opulent artery than ever before? The simple truth is--and he knows nothing about this controversy who fails to perceive such truth--that the system whose hands are now armed against us has always borne these arms in its heart; that the fang which is now bared has hitherto been only concealed, not wanting; that the tree which is to-day in bloody blossom is the same tree it ever was, and carried these blossoms in its sap long ere spreading them upon its boughs.

To this predaceous system what do we oppose? We oppose a socialization that has features,--I will say no more,--has _features_ of generous breadth and promise, that are the best fruition of many countries and centuries. Faults and drawbacks it has enough and to spare; conspicuous among which may be named the vulgar and disgusting "negrophobia,"--a mark of under-breeding which one hopes may not disgrace us always. But let us be carried away by no mania for self-criticism. Two claims for ourselves may be made. First, a higher grade of laws nowhere exists with a less amount of coercive application,--exists, that is, by the rational and constant choice of the whole people. Secondly, it may be questioned whether anywhere in the world the development of intelligence and moral force in the whole people is to a greater extent a national aim. But abandoning all comparison with other peoples, this we may say with no doubtful voice: We stand for the best ideas of the Old World in the New; we stand for orderly-freedom and true socialization in America; we stand for these, and with us these must here stand or fall.

Now, of course, we are not about to become the offscouring of the earth by yielding these up to destruction. Of course, we shall not convert ourselves into a nation of Iscariots, and give over civilization to the bowie-knife, with the mere hope of so making money out of Southern trade,--which we should not do,--and with the certainty of a gibbet in history, to mention no greater penalty.

But refusing this perfidy, could we have avoided this war? No; for it was simply our refusal of such perfidy which, so far as we are concerned, brought the war on. The South, having ever since the Mexican War stood with its sword half out of the scabbard, perpetually threatening to give its edge,--having made it the chief problem of our politics, by what gift or concession to purchase exemption from that dreaded blade,--at last reached its ultimate demand. "Will you," it said to the North, "abdicate the privileges of equal citizenship? Will you give up this continent, territory, Free States and all, to our predaceous, blood-eating system? Will you sell into slavery the elective franchise itself? Will you sell the elective franchise itself into slavery, and take for pay barely the poltroon's price, that of being scornfully spared by the sword we stand ready to draw?" The North excused itself politely. In the softest voice, but with a soft-voicedness that did not wholly conceal an iron thread of resolution, it declined to comply with that most modest demand. Then the sword came out and struck at our life. "Was it matter of choice with us whether we would fight? Not unless it were also matter of choice whether we would become the very sweepings and blemish of creation.

"But we might have permitted secession." No, we could not. It was clearly impracticable. "But why not?" _Because that would have been to surrender the whole under the guise of giving up half_. Such a concession could have meant to the people of the rebellious States, and, in the existing state of national belief, could have meant to our very selves, nothing other than this:--"We submit; do what you will; we are shopkeepers and cowards; we must have your trade; and besides, though expert in the use of yardsticks, we have not the nerve for handling guns." From that moment we should have lost all authority on this continent, and all respect on the other.

The English papers have blamed us for fighting; but had we failed to fight, not one of these censuring mouths but would have hissed at us like an adder with contempt Nay, we ourselves should, as it were, soon have lost the musical speech and high carriage of men, and fallen to a proneness and a hissing, degraded in our own eyes even more than in those of our neighbors. Of course, from this state we should have risen; but it would have been to see the redness of war on our own fields and its flames wrapping our own households. We should have risen, but through a contest to which this war, gigantic though it be, is but a quarrel of school-boys.

By sheer necessity we began to fight; by the same we must fight It out. Compromise is, in the nature of the case, impossible. It can mean only _surrender_. Had there been an inch more of ground for us to yield without total submission, the war would have been, for the present, staved off. We turned to bay only when driven back to the vital principle of our polity and the vital facts of our socialization.

Politically, what was the immediate grievance of the South? Simply that Northern freemen went to the polls as freemen; simply that they there expressed, under constitutional forms, their lawful preference. How can we compromise here, even to the breadth of a hair? How compromise without stipulating that all Northern electors shall henceforth go to the polls in charge of an armed police, and there deposit such ballot as the slave-masters of the Secession States shall direct?

Again, in our social state what is it that gives umbrage to our antagonists? They have answered the question for us; they have stated it repeatedly in the plainest English. It is simply the fact that we _are_ free States; that we have, and honor, free labor; that we have schools for the people; that we teach the duty of each to all and of all to each; that we respect the human principle, the spiritual possibility, in man; in fine, that ours is a human socialization, whose fundamental principles are the venerableness of man's nature and the superiority of reason and right to any individual will. So far as we are base bargainers and unbelievers, they can tolerate us, even though they despise; just where our praise begins, begin their detestation and animosity.

It is, by the pointed confession of Southern spokesmen, what we are, rather than what we have done, which makes them Secessionists; and any man of sense might, indeed must, see this fact, were the confession withheld. In action we have conformed to Southern wishes, as if conformity could not be in excess. We have conformed to an extent that--to mention nothing of more importance--had nearly ruined us in the estimation of mankind. One chief reason, indeed, why the sympathy of Europe did not immediately go with us was that a disgust toward us had been created by the football passivity, as it seemed abroad, with which we had submitted to be kicked to and fro. The rebellion was deemed to be on our side, not on theirs. We, born servitors and underlings, it was thought, had forgotten our proper places,--nay, had presumed to strike back, when our masters chastised us. Of course, we should soon be whipped to our knees again. And when we were again submissive and abject, Europe must so have demeaned itself as still to be on good terms with the conquerors. As for us, our final opinion of their demeanor, so they deemed, mattered very little. The ill opinion of the servants can be borne; but one must needs be on friendly terms with the master of the house. The conduct of Europe toward us at the outbreak of this war is to be thus explained, more than in any other way. According to European understanding, we had before written ourselves down menials; therefore, on rising to the attitude of men, we were scorned as upstarts.