“Oh!” says Elder Judas Wart, with a low deep groan, “oh! how unpractical females always are. Females are carried away by their sympathies and religious feelings and sense of right and duty, making them a most dangerous element in politics, a very striking and unwholesome contrast to the present admirable system of government, if they were ever incorporated into the body politic; in short, if they ever vote. Let us look on the subject in a practical light.”
And I was so beat out by my eloquent emotions (such emotions are beautiful to have by you, but fatiguin’ to handle, as I handle ’em, and I can’t deny it); and bein’ also almost completely out of wind, I sot still, and let him go on.
And he talked, I should judge, well on to a quarter of a hour about Communism, Socialism, its principles, its rise, and progress; and I let him go on, and didn’t hardly say a word, only I would merely throw in little observations occasionally, such as, when he argued that everybody should own the same amount of property, and there should be no rich and no poor.
I merely threw in this question to him: Whether he thought shiftlessness and laziness should have the same reward as industry and frugality?
And when he was a goin’ on about everybody bein’ educated the same so one could not be intellectually superior to the other, I simply asked him whether he thought Nature was a Socialist.
Says he: “Why?”
“Oh!” says I, “I was a thinkin’ if she was one, she didn’t live up to her belief. She didn’t equalize brains and thrift and economy.”
“Wall, as I was a sayin’” says he, “as it were, you know”—
“No,” says I, coldly, “I don’t know it, nor I never did. I know,” says I, lookin’ keen at him, “that some are born almost fools, and keep on so; and some,” says I, with a sort of modest, becomin’ look, “some are very smart.”
He kep’ perfectly still for a minute, or mebby a minute and a ½. he seemed to collect his strength agin, and broke out, in a loud, haughty tone: