"'Know them, as soon as seen, to be their lords,
And reverence the secret God in them.'"
Harry's beautiful face was wonderfully illuminated. Strange, this unconscious consciousness of the elect!
"The relation of master and slave," I went on,—for the Doctor did not offer to speak,—"is, in Shaler's opinion, a most perverted and unnatural one; but he believes in that of protector and protected. The love of power, the instinct of dominion, is strong in him. Perhaps it must be so in those who are to be called to its exercise. 'I know thy pride,' David's elder brother said to him, when the boy left the charge of his few sheep to offer himself as the champion of a nation. But Shaler's ambition was directed by the precept, 'Let him who would be greatest among you be your servant';—whether deliberately, or by the spontaneous flow of his large, generous nature, I do not know. Whatever superiority he possessed, whether of position, education, or natural endowment, he employed for the advantage of the people under his care. All the proceeds of the estate were spent upon it. The land was brought into a high state of cultivation. Its productiveness was not only maintained, but increased. Nor was beauty neglected. Groves were planted, marshes drained, ponds formed. The old cabins gave place to new and pretty cottages. The owners and builders were encouraged to employ their own invention on them; thus there was great variety in the architecture. Vines planted about them, by favor of our kind climate, soon draped them luxuriantly, harmonizing the whole, and giving even to eccentricities of form a beauty of their own. While he took care that ability and energy should enjoy their just return of prosperity, the inferior, whether in body, mind, or soul, were not Pariahs. As Shaler believed the exercise of beneficent power to be the greatest privilege accorded to mortals, he made it one of the chief rewards of exertion."
"Was the privilege appreciated?" asked the Doctor.
"The slave of a tyrannical master is too often the most brutal of oppressors; but disinterestedness and tenderness have a sympathetic force, no less, surely, than rapacity and cruelty. Besides, with a race in which sense of honor is so leading a characteristic as in the African, the glory of being the doer and the giver, the shame of being the mere idle recipient, are very potent. Shaler was not too wise and good for dealing with ordinary human nature; he was considerate of innocent weaknesses, even of those with which his nature least enabled him to sympathize. He found, for example, that his people did not like to see the 'great house' on their estate surpassed in furniture and decoration by the mansions of neighboring planters. He respected their simple pride. He understood that his house was their palace, their state-house,—that their wish to embellish it was, in fact, a form of public spirit. He indulged them in what was no indulgence to himself."
"Harvey has rather the advantage of him there: he can please himself and his people at the same time. How long have you known the Harvey plantation,—Land's End, as Judge Harvey called it, when he first came to settle here?"
Wednesday, April 10, 1844.
"How long have you known the Harvey plantation?" Dr. Borrow had just asked me.