The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V / Political Essays

E-text prepared by Thierry Alberto and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Mr. Lowell in 1881
RIVERSIDE EDITION
THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
IN PROSE AND POETRY
VOLUME V
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become king.