No doubt, deeds of equal infamy are done in the dens of New York. But in New York they are infamous. In New York they are indeed done in dens, by felons who flee the eye of the policeman,—unless, to be sure, the police have been appointed by a certain alter ego of yours in negro-hatred, whilom chief magistrate and disgrace of that unfortunate city. But under your life-service régime things are managed in a more enlightened way. There they who have liberty—and sometimes use the liberty—to torture women into beastly submissions, do not hide from the laws, they make the laws. There such a personage as the one mentioned may be a gentleman, a man of high standing," one of the most respectable men in the State" (Florida).
And this, just this,—for surely you will not be a coward, and dodge consequences,—you name a scheme of life-hire. This you esteem so much superior to our democratic way of holding each man and woman to be the shrine of rights which have an infinite sanctity, and of adjudging it the chief duty of the State to annex to these rights the requisite force for their practical assertion.
Is it, then, You, or is it some burglarious Devil that has broken into your bosom and stolen your soul, who is engaged in plastering over this infernal fester with smooth euphemisms? Are You verily the mechanic who is engaged in veneering these out-houses of hell with rosewood? Is it your very and proper Self that stands there sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on the accursed reek of that pit of putrescence, so to disguise and commend it to the nostrils of mankind? Is it in very deed Thomas Carlyle, Thomas the Great, who now volunteers his services as male lady's-maid to the queen-strumpet of modern history, and offers to her sceptred foulness the benefit of his skill at the literary rouge-pots? You? Yes? I give you joy of your avocations! Truly, it was worth the while, having such a cause, to defame a noble people in the very hour of their life-and-death struggle!
Well, you have made your election; now I make mine. It is my deliberate belief that no man ever gave heartier love and homage to another than I to you; but while one woman in America may be lawfully sent to the whipping-post on such occasion, I will hold your existence and name, if they come between me and her rescue, but as the life of a stinging gnat! I love you,—but cannot quite sacrifice to you the sanctity of womanhood, and all the honor and all the high hopes of a great nation. Your scheme of "life-hire" will therefore have to undergo very essential modifications, such as will not only alter, but reverse, its most characteristic features, before I can esteem either it or the advocacy of it anything less than abominable.
But where are you now with relation to that Thomas Carlyle whose "Sartor Resartus" I read twenty years ago afoot and on horseback, sleeping with it under my pillow and wearing it in my pocket till pocket and it were worn out,—I alone there in the remote solitudes of Maine? We have both travelled far since then; but whither have you been travelling? The whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then; but now you can be jolly in your "nutshell." Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially is? Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society, something better than a doctrine of personal rights, something more noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of powers and their consequent duties; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest advocates. Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate to the spiritual possibilities of man; now, social infidelity plus cotton and polite dining would seem to suffice for you.
Ah, Heaven! is anything sadder than to see a grand imperial soul, long worthy and secure of all love and honor, at length committing suicide, not by dying, but by living? Ill it is when they that do deepest homage to a great spirit can no longer pray for the increase of his days; when there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cadum redeas! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How friendly is Death,—Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound us hand and foot"?
Royal you are, royal in pity as in purpose; and you have done, nay, I trust may still be doing, imperishable work. If only you did not hate democracy so bitterly as to be perpetually prostrated by the recoil of your own gun! Right or wrong in its inception, this aversion has now become a chronic ailment, which drains insatiably at the fountains of your spiritual force. I offer you the suggestion; I can do no more.
To have lost, in the hour of our trial, the fellowship of yourself, and of others in England whom we most delighted to honor, is a loss indeed. Yet we grieve a thousand times more for you than for ourselves; and are not absorbed in any grief. It is clear to us that the Eternal Providence has assigned us our tasks, not by your advice, nor by vote of Parliament,—astonishing to sundry as that may seem. Your opinion of the matter we hold, therefore, to be quite beside the matter; and drivel, like that of your nutshell-epic, by no means tends to make us wish that Providence had acted upon European counsel rather than upon His Own! Moreover, we are very busy in these days, and can have small eye to the by-standers. We are busy, and are likely to be so long; for the peace that succeeds to such a war will be as dangerous and arduous as the war itself. We have as little time, therefore, to grieve as to brag or bluster; we must work. We neither solicit nor repel your sympathy; we must work,—work straight on, and let all that be as it can be.
We seek not to conceal even from you that our democracy has great weaknesses, as well as great strength. Mean, mercenary, and stolid men are not found in England alone; they are ominously abundant here also. We have lunatic radicalisms as well as sane, idiotic conservatisms as well as intelligent. Too much for safety, our politics are purulent, our good men over-apt to forget the objects of government in a besotted devotion to the form. It is possible we may yet discover that universal suffrage can be a trifle too universal,—that it should pause a little short of the state-prison. New York must see to it that the thief does not patronize the judge, and sit in the prisoner's box as on the bench of a higher court. Our democracy has somewhat to learn; it knows that it has somewhat to learn, and says cheerfully, "What is the use of living without learning?"