Destiny has guided us till now, and has made us what we are, but we who now realize the omnipotence of the divinely guided Will, have become potentially the makers—let us take it in our hands and shape our own career, for the sooner we rise to the heights of our Being, the sooner shall we be able to stretch down helping hands to the suffering Humanity of To-day.
Pilgrim.
Tea Table Talk.
THE TENDENCY OF THE PRESENT CIVILIZATION.—An Ancient Hindu Story.
Pretty much every subject comes up for discussion at our afternoon tea-table. Hence I was not surprised lately, walking in upon our five-o’clock callers, to find an argument on crime going the rounds with the bread and butter.
“What is the worst thing you have seen in the papers lately?” This question imparted the flavor of caviare to the mild refreshment of the ladies. The Club Bachelor held a certain divorce case to be——; the mother drowned the rest in the peremptory rattle of her tea-cups and instanced cruelty to the child slave of an Italian padrone. Sue let off a pyrotechnic series of wrath-compelling wrongs to animals, whom she considers “miles above horrid humans.” The widow pilloried that brutal subject of recent press dispatches “who murdered his fifth wife at her tea-table. Fancy! What an invasion of the Sanctuary.” Pretty Polly was also heard battling vi et armis with the Medical Student over a breach of promise case, and all were moderately heated over these comparative claims to condemnation when the professor entered. Tumultuously appealed to, he replied in his serious way that if he must discriminate between evils, he should give precedence to the matter of the Chicago Anarchists. First, because of the blood-shed and riot; second, because of recent manifestations of incipient public sympathy with the criminals. “For,” said he, “considering the infectious nature of the evil, a crime which strikes at principles as well as at humanity is a thousandfold crime.”
A murmur of approbation showed that as usual, he had conveyed the ultimate sense of the tea-table,—minus a paltry minority. For the widow fixing her eyes on me where I had edged between Polly and the Student, remarked that Mr. Julius looked “as if he sympathised with incitors of riots rather than with their victims.”
The prompt horror visible on Polly’s face nettled me into this reply. “Madam, your discrimination merits my homage, I am not totally devoid of all sympathy with the incitors of riots,” (gutturals of dismay from every throat,) “for those incitors,” here I bowed in a semi circle, “are yourselves.”