He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To “resist not evil” seemed to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his creed. There was no other necessity in this life.
“But a man must live,” said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell, he had refused assistance.
“No, sir; that is just what he can’t do. A man must die! So, while he lives, let him be a man!”
How inharmonious a setting, then, for Dr. Sevier, was 3½ Carondelet Street! As he drove each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk—a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that “Time is money.”
“It’s a great deal more, sir, it’s life!” the Doctor always retorted.
Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor’s horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet Street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.
“Look at the wreckers!” he would say.
It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.
So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting.
“Yes, I have money. But I don’t go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service’s sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?”