The ways of the hour

by James Fenimore Cooper

“If you love me, Timms, never repeat that diabolical phrase again,” said Dunscomb, looking quite serious, however much there might have been of affectation in his aspect. “It is even worse than Hurlgate, which I have told you fifty times I cannot endure. ‘Lady friend’ is infernally vulgar, and I will not stand it. You may blow your nose with your fingers, if it give you especial satisfaction, and you may blow out against aristocracy as much as you please; but you shall not talk to me about ‘lady-friends’ or ‘Hurlgate.’ I am no dandy, but a respectable elderly gentleman, who professes to speak English, and who wishes to be addressed in his own language. Heaven knows what the country is coming to! There is Webster, to begin with, cramming a Yankee dialect down our throats for good English; then comes all the cant of the day, flourishing finical phrases, and new significations to good old homely words, and changing the very nature of mankind by means of terms. Last of all, is this infernal Code, in which the ideas are as bad as possible, and the terms still worse. But whom do you mean by your ‘lady-friend?’”

“The French lady that has been with our client, now, for a fortnight. Depend on it, she will do us no good when we are on. She is too aristocratic altogether.”

Dunscomb laughed outright. Then he passed a hand across his brow, and seemed to muse.

“All this is very serious,” he at length replied, “and is really no laughing matter. A pretty pass are we coming to, if the administration of the law is to be influenced by such things as these! The doctrine is openly held that the rich shall not, ought not to embellish their amusements at a cost that the poor cannot compass; and here we have a member of the bar telling us a prisoner shall not have justice because she has a foreign maid-servant!”

“A servant! Call her anything but that, ’Squire, if you wish for success! A prisoner accused of capital crimes, with a servant, would be certain to be condemned. Even the court would hardly stand that.”

“Timms, you are a shrewd, sagacious fellow, and are apt to laugh in your sleeve at follies of this nature, as I well know from long acquaintance; and here you insist on one of the greatest of all the absurdities.”

“Things are changed in Ameriky, Mr. Dunscomb. The people are beginning to govern; and when they can’t do it legally, they do it without law. Don’t you see what the papers say about having operas and play-houses at the people’s prices, and the right to hiss? There’s Constitution for you! I wonder what Kent and Blackstone would say to that?”

“Sure enough. They would find some novel features in a liberty which says a man shall not set the price on the seats in his own theatre, and that the hissing may be done by an audience in the streets. The facts are, Timms, that all these abuses about O. P.’s, and controlling other persons’ concerns under the pretence that the public has rights where, as a public, it has no rights at all, come from the reaction of a half-way liberty in other countries. Here, where the people are really free, having all the power, and where no political right is hereditary, the people ought, at least, to respect their own ordinances.”

“Do you not consider a theatre a public place, ’Squire Dunscomb?”

“In one sense it is, certainly; but not in the sense that bears on this pretended power over it. The very circumstance that the audience pay for their seats, makes it, in law as in fact, a matter of covenant. As for this newfangled absurdity about its being a duty to furnish low-priced seats for the poor, where they may sit and look at pretty women because they cannot see them elsewhere, it is scarcely worth an argument. If the rich should demand that the wives and daughters of the poor should be paraded in the pits and galleries, for their patrician eyes to feast on, a pretty clamour there would be! If the state requires cheap theatres, and cheap women, let the state pay for them, as it does for its other wants; but, if these amusements are to be the object of private speculations, let private wisdom control them. I have no respect for one-sided liberty, let it cant as much as it may.”