Not to mention that a Quaker world, all
faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,--what should
we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no
literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a
sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be
thrown out of employment. The wife and mother, for example, with as
indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me
monthly,--what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband
forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism? The
pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the
very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and
him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the
curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she
is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been
feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.
Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel
Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of
Broadbrims. The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them
highly as a preterite phenomenon; but they were _not_ good at cakes and
ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.
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