"I shall not allow you to persuade me I know my own country so little. Conduct like this will stamp a man with disgrace in America as well as elsewhere."
"Conduct like this would, but it will no longer. The pell-mell that rages has brought honourable men into a sad minority, and even Mr. Dodge will tell you the majority must rule. Were he to publish my letter, a large portion of his readers would fancy he was merely asserting the liberty of the press. Heavens save us! You have been dreaming abroad, Ned Effingham, while your country has retrograded, in all that is respectable and good, a century in a dozen years!"
As this was the usual language of John Effingham, neither of his listeners thought much of it, though Mr. Effingham more decidedly expressed an intention to cut off even the slight communication with the offender, he had permitted himself to keep up, since they had been on board.
"Think better of it, dear father," said Eve; "for such a man is scarcely worthy of even your resentment. He is too much your inferior in principles, manners, character, station, and everything else, to render him of so much account; and then, were we to clear up this masquerade into which the chances of a ship have thrown us, we might have our scruples concerning others, as well as concerning this wolf in sheep's clothing."
"Say rather an ass, shaved and painted to resemble a zebra," muttered John. "The fellow has no property as respectable as the basest virtue of a wolf."
"He has at least rapacity."
"And can howl in a pack. This much, then, I will concede to you: but I agree with Eve, we must either punish him affirmatively, by pulling his ears, or treat him with contempt, which is always negative or silent. I wish he had entered the state-room of that fine young fellow, Paul Blunt, who is of an age and a spirit to give him a lesson that might make a paragraph for his Active Inquirer, if not a scissors' extract of himself."
Eve knew that the offender had been there too, but she had too much prudence to betray him.
"This will only so much the more oblige him," she said, laughingly; "for Mr. Blunt, in speaking of the editor of the Active Inquirer, said that he had the failing to believe that this earth, and all it contained, was created merely to furnish materials for newspaper paragraphs."
The gentlemen laughed with the amused Eve, and Mr. Effingham remarked, that "there did seem to be men so perfectly selfish, so much devoted to their own interests, and so little sensible of the rights and feelings of others, as to manifest a desire to render the press superior to all other power; not," he concluded, "in the way of argument, or as an agent of reason, but as a master, coarse, corrupt, tyrannical and vile; the instrument of selfishness, instead of the right, and when not employed as the promoter of personal interests, to be employed as the tool of personal passions."