"We must take our precautions. We intend to do so. The dividing line must be more strongly marked. They must have their level prescribed to them, and be held to it."
"The more you confirm their degradation, the more you prepare your own. The vile and abject, for being helpless, are not harmless. Unapt for honest service, but ready tools of evil, they corrupt the class whose parasites they are, tempting the strong and generous to tyranny and scorn."
"You know them!"
"They are known of old. The world has never wanted such.
'The wretches will not be dragged out to sunlight.
They man their very dungeons for their masters,
Lest godlike Liberty, the common foe,
Should enter in, and they be judged hereafter
Accomplices of freedom!'
"But ten righteous men are enough to redeem a state. No State of ours but has men enough, greatly more than enough, to save and to exalt it, whose descent pledges them to integrity and entitles them to authority. Only let them know themselves, and stand by themselves and by each other.
'Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.'
And it will. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, but their virtues are a perpetual inheritance.
"I should not talk as I have been talking out of the family."—The Doctor fell into his familiar tone.—"I take in Colvil, because I know, if we had time to trace it up, we should not go back far without coming upon common ancestors. Our pedigrees all run one into another. When I see a New-England man, I almost take for granted a cousin. I found one out not many days' journey from here, by opening the old family Bible, which made an important part of the furniture of his log-house, and running over the names of his grandmothers. I am so well informed in regard to your great-grandfather, because his story is a part of my own family history. It is through your mother that you are related to Harry. Perhaps, if she had lived long enough for you to remember her, you would not have forgotten New England."