"Stay, uncle—I am just going to be married," said he; and "Stay, Zachariah!" said a dozen others; when some one suddenly calling out, "Let him go; he is afraid of being turned out of meeting if he witnesses the ceremony," I was suffered to obey the impulses of the spirit within me, and walk out of the house; which I did without exactly knowing what I was doing.
To tell the honest truth—as, indeed, I have been trying to do all along—I was in a kind of maze and bewilderment of mind, which the first shock of ruin had produced, and which Jonathan's story rather increased than diminished. The effect of this was divided in my brain with the impression of the various proofs of ingratitude and baseness to which the day had given birth, the latter, however, being greatly preponderant. Of one feeling only I had entire consciousness, and that was a hearty disgust of philanthropy, coupled with a sense of shame at having been so basely cheated as I seemed to have been on all sides. I had been cheated out of my senses, as the saying is; and the only cure for me was to be cheated into them again; which was not an agreeable reflection, the whole affair being a reproach on my good sense.
On the whole, I felt very melancholy and lugubrious, and began to have my thoughts of leaving Zachariah Longstraw's body at the first convenient opportunity. The great difficulty was, however, to find a tenement in which I might promise myself content, the disappointment I had experienced in my present adventure having filled me with doubts as to the reality of any human happiness. "At least," said I to myself "I will henceforth look before I leap. I will cast mine eyes about me, I will gird up my loins and look abroad into the human family, and peradventure I shall find some man whose body is worth reanimating. Yea, verily, I will next time be certain I am not putting my soul, as the pickpocket did his hand, into a sack of fish-hooks."
With this resolution on my mind I walked towards my house, and was just about to pass the door, when an adventure befell me which knocked the aforesaid resolution entirely on the head. But before I relate it my conscience impels me to make one remark, which I beg the reader, if he be a man of fortune and blood, to peruse, without excusing himself on the score of its dulness.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
A REMARK, IN WHICH THE AUTHOR APPEARS AS A POLITICIAN, AND ABUSES BOTH PARTIES.
There are other persons besides Zachariah the philanthropist, who have experienced the ingratitude of the poor; and, truth to say, if we can believe the accounts of those who profess to have the best means of judging, there is more of it among that class of beings in the United States than in any other Christian land. If it be so, let not the reader wonder at its existence. It springs, like a thousand other evils of a worse, because of a political complexion, from that constitution of society which, notwithstanding its being in opposition to all the interests of the land and the character of our institutions, is founded in, and perpetuated by, the folly of the richer classes. It lies, not in the natural enmity supposed to exist between the rich and the poor, but in the unnatural hatred provoked in the bosoms of the one by the offensive pride and arrogance of the other. The poor man in America feels himself, in a political view, as he really is, the equal of the millionaire; but this very consciousness of equality adds double bitterness to the sense of actual inferiority, which the richer and more fortunate usually do their best, as far as manners and deportment are concerned, to keep alive. Why should the folly of a feudal aristocracy prevail under the shadow of a purely democratic government? It is to the stupid pride, the insensate effort at pomp and ostentation, the unconcealed contempt of labour, the determination, manifested in a thousand ways, and always as unfeelingly as absurdly, to keep the "base mechanical" aware of the gulf between him and his betters—in a word, to the puerile vanity and stolid pride of the genteel and refined, that we owe the exasperation of those classes in whose hands lie the reins of power, and who will use them for good or bad purposes, according as they are kept in a good or bad humour. It is to these things we trace, besides the general demoralization ever resulting from passions long encouraged, besides the unwilling and unthankful reception of benefits coming from the hands of the detested, all those political evils which demagoguism, agrarianism, mobocracism, and all other isms of a vulgar stamp, have brought upon the land. There is pride in the poor, as well as the rich: the wise man and the patriot will take care not to offend it.
Reader, if thou art a rich man, and despisest thy neighbour, remember that he has a thousand friends of his class where thou hast one of thine, and that he can beat thee at the elections. If thou art a gentleman, remember that thy cobbler is another, or thinks himself so—which is all the same thing in America. At all events, remember this—namely, that the poor man will find no fault with thy wealth, if thou findest none with his poverty.