If "all men are liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so
that David's _dictum_ hardly needs his apology of _haste_, it is a
comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic;
and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may
put us on our guard. _Sympathetic_ we think a better name than the
unfortunate title of _white_, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because
that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue;
and instead of protecting our virtue, may even expose us to practise
them without remorse. Of laughing over them and making light of them,
and calling them by various ludicrous synonymes, as _fibs_, and _telling
the thing that is not_, there has been enough. We have a purpose in our
essay, than which no preaching could be more sober. Our aim is to give
for them no opiate, but to quicken the sense of their guilt, and their
exceeding mischief, too; for, if Francis Bacon be right in declaring the
lie we swallow down more dangerous than that which only passes through
our mind, how seriously the wine-bibbing of this sweet poison of kindly
misrepresentation must have weakened the constitution of mankind! Lying
for selfish gain or glory, for sensual pleasure, or for exculpation from
a criminal charge, is more gross, but it involves at once such
condemnation in society, and such inward reproach, as to be far less
insidious than lying out of amiable consideration for others, to shield
or further kinsfolk or friends, which may pass unrebuked, or stand for
an actual merit. Yet, be the motive what it may, there is a certain
invariable quantity of essential baseness in all violation of the truth;
and it may be feared our affectionate falsehoods often work more evil
than our malignant ones, by having free course and meeting with little
objection. "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for
Him?" severely asks the old prophet of those who thought to cheat for
their own set, as though it were in the cause of religion; and no godly
soul can accept as a grateful tribute the least prevarication, however
disinterested or devoted in its behalf. Indeed, no smart antithesis has
been so hurtful as the overstated distinction between _black_ lies and
_white_. They are of different species, but have no generic difference.
Charles Reade's novel, of "White Lies," in which the deceptions of love
are so glorified, charming story as it is, will sap the character of
whoever does not, with a mental protest, countermine its main idea. The
very theory of our integrity is gone, if we do not insist on this. God
has not so made the world that any perjury or cover of the facts is
necessary to serve the cause of goodness. Commend it though English or
German critics do, can we not conceive of a speech grander than the
untruth which Shakspeare has put into the dying Desdemona's mouth?
Let us, then, examine some of the forms of sympathetic lying.
One of them is that of over-liberal praise. That a person is always
ready to extol others, and was never heard to speak ill of anybody under
the sun, appears to some the very crown of excellence. But what is the
panegyric worth that has no discrimination, that finds any mortal
faultless, or bestows on the varying and contradictory behaviors of men
an equal meed? To what does universal commendation amount more than
universal indifference? What value do we put on the lavish regard which
is not _individual_, or founded on any intelligent appreciation of its
object, but scattered blindly abroad on all flesh, as once thousands
were vaguely baptized in the open air by a general sprinkling, and which
any one can appropriate only as he may own a certain indeterminate
section of an undivided township or unfenced common? To have a good
word for everybody, and take exception to nothing, is to incapacitate
one's self for the exquisite delight of real fellowship. We all know
persons who seem a sort of social favorites on account of this gracious
manner which they afford with such mechanical plenty. But what a
dilution and deterioration their external quality of half-artificial
courtesy becomes! It is handing round sweetened water, instead of
tasting the juice of the grape. It is pouring from a pail, instead of
opening a vial of sweet odors. This broadcast and easy approval lacks
that very honesty which, in the absence of fineness, is the single grace
by which it could be sanctified.
The same vice affects more public concerns. Of what sheer hypocrisy
eulogistic resolutions upon officers leaving their posts in Church or
State are too frequently composed! The men who are tired and want to get
rid of their Representative or minister are so overjoyed at losing sight
of him, that they can set no bounds to their thankful exaltation of his
name! Truly they speed the parting guest, wish well to the traveller
from their latitude, and launch with shouts the ship of his fortunes
from their _ways_! They recommend him as a paragon of genius and
learning to all communities or societies who want a service in his kind.
How happy both sides to this transaction are expected to feel, and how
willing people are sometimes to add to the soft words a solid
testimonial of gold, if only thus a dismissal can be effected! But are
not the reports of the committees and the votes of the meetings false
coin, nowhere current in the kingdom of God, circulate as they may in
this realm of earth? Nay, does not everybody, save the one that receives
the somewhat insincere and left-handed blessing, read the formal and
solemn record with a disposition to ridicule or a pitying smile?
How well it is understood that we are not to speak the truth, but only
good, of the dead! How melancholy it is, that _lying_ has come to be so
common an epithet for the gravestones we set over their dust! How few
obituaries characterize those for whom they are written, or are
distinguishable from each other in the terms of their funeral
celebrations of departed virtue! How refreshing, as rare, is any of the
veritable description which implies real lamentation! But what a
suspicion falls on the mourning in whose loquacity we cannot detect one
natural tone! As if that last messenger, who strips off all delusions
and appearances, should be pursued and affronted with the mockery of our
pretence, and we could circumvent the angel of judgment with the
sentence of our fond wishes and the affectation of our groundless
claims! As if the disembodied, in the light of truth, by which they are
surrounded and pierced, could be pleased with our make-believe, or
tolerate the folly of our factitious phrase! With what sadness their
purged eyes must follow the pens inditing their epitaphs, and the
sculptors' chisels making the commonplaces of fulsome commendation
permanent on their tombs! What vanity to their nicer ears must be the
sonorous and declamatory orator's breath! Let us not offend them so.
They will take it for the insult of perfunctory honor, not for the
sympathy it assumes to be. _Nothing but good of the dead_, do you say?
_Nothing but truth of the dead_, we answer. _Do not disturb their bones;
let them rest easy at last_, is the commentary on all keen criticism of
those who have played important parts in life, and whose influence has
perhaps been a curse. No, we reply, their bones will rest easier, and
their benedictions come to us surer, for our unaffected plain-dealing.
The trick of flattery may succeed with the living. Those still in this
world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by
the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in
our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with
their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed
upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other
speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be
patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language.
Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport
us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express
myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he
took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise
the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be
only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before
whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!
But _private conversation_ is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our
antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth,
trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end
in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often
break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to
others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or
the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil
passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be
successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have
brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they
have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood
of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any
pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating
together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has
unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily
we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we
converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed
what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be
for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds
of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and
inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public
sentiment. Such a paper as the London "Times," having nothing higher
than avaricious commerce and national pride to consult, in a conspicuous
centre of affairs has thus become the great weathercock of the world,
splendidly gilded, lifted very high in the air, but, like some other
stupid chanticleers, crowing at false signals of the dawn, and well
called the "Times," as in its columns nothing eternal was ever evinced.
Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a
power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in
every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law
of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility,
blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of
our private word. Through what manifold phases _a good conversationist_
has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights
that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of
the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some
of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the
road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides
of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable
equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the
apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in Paul
it never did, the fundamental consistency of principle which is the
chief sign of spiritual life. The degree of elevation in the scale of
being is marked by the approximation of the sight to a focus of unity.
But, judging from the pictures they give us of their interior states, we
might think many of our rational companions as myriad-eyed as
naturalists tell us are some insects. Behold the wondrous transformation
undergone by those very looks and features that give the natural
language, as sentiments contrary to each other are successively
presented, and Republican or Democrat, Pro-Slavery man or Abolitionist,
walks up! In truth, a man at once kindly and ingenuous can hardly help
in most assemblies coming continually to grief. He knows not what to do,
to be at once frank and polite. The transverse beams of the cross on
which he is crucified are made of the sincerity and amiability which in
no company can he quite reconcile. Happy is he who has discovered
beneath all pleasant humors the unity at bottom of candor with goodness,
in an Apostle's clause, "speaking the truth in love"! No rare and
beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but
shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice
how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man
vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when
the _encore_ took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing
engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent
whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near
him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move
a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and
approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In
the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a
distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany
the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The
great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at
description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He
affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes
have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to
reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that
acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his
function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more
perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than
turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or
transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic
lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was
it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The
most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is
direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie.
Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their
mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the
conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the
crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the
uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or
leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any
line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our
common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in
great cathedrals, and our lowest whispers like tones caught from angelic
harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but
whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough.
The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and
stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The
proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets
will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is
a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact,
does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic
secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the
streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of
speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing,
minding others' business, interfering with their relations,
impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand,
and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of
good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been
scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than
with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination
of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always
no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in
dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving
concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands
and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or
strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such _discrete_
sentences--if we may use rhetorically a musical word--from your lips
afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes
and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at
one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall
kiss each other.
Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social
machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily
overlooked,--we mean in _letters of introduction_. But the falsehood is
only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble
design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the
elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the
comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege
of all liberal arts, and promote the offices of a common brotherhood.
How much we owe to these little paper messengers for the new treasures
of love and learning they have brought! It is hard to tell whose debt to
them is greatest, that of the giver, the bearer, or the receiver, or
whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has
not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must
be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and
degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather
than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of
the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We
are a little afraid of it, when it comes. A worthy man told me he knew
not whether to be sorry or glad, when he found a letter addressed to him
at the post-office. How does the balance incline, when a man or woman
stands before us with a letter of introduction in hand? We eye it with a
mistrust that it may turn out to be a tool of torture, serving us only
for a sort of mental surgery. Frequently, it has been simply procured,
and is but an impudent falsehood on its very face. The writer of it
professes an admiration he does not feel for the person introduced, to
whose own reading he leaves it magnificently open before its terms of
exaggerated compliment can reach him to whom it is sent. What is the
reason of this deceit? there is a ground for it, no doubt. "This effect
defective comes by cause." The inditer has certainly some sympathy with
the bearer he so amply commissions and wordily exalts. This bearer has
some distress to be relieved, some faculty to exercise, some institution
to recommend, or some ware to dispose of. He that forwards him to us
very likely has first had him introduced to himself, has bestowed
attention and hospitable fellowship upon him, and now, growing weary of
the care and trouble and expense, is very happy to be rid of him at so
small a cost as that of passing him on to a distant acquaintance by a
letter of introduction, which the holder's business in life is to carry
round from place to place through the world! Sometimes dear companions
call on us to pay this tax; sometimes those who themselves have no claim
on us. But, be it one class or the other, how little they may consider
what they demand! Upon what a neglect or misappreciation of values the
proceed! Verily we need a new Political Economy written, deeper than
that of Malthus or Smith, to inform them. Our precious time, our cordial
regards, the diversion of our mind from our regular duties, the neglect
of already engrossing relations in our business or profession, the
surrender of body and soul, they require for the prey of idlers and
strangers! Had our correspondents drawn upon us for a sum of money, had
a highwayman bid us stand and deliver our purse, we should not have been
so much out of pocket. But we cannot help yielding; there is no excuse
or escape. We are under the operation of that most delicate and
resistless of powers no successor of Euclid ever explained the principle
of, which may be called the _social screw_. We submit patiently, because
we cannot endure to deny to the new-comer the assumed right of him who
cruelly turns it, out of reach and out of sight. We know some men, of
extraordinary strength of countenance themselves, who have been able to
defend their door-stone against an impostor's brazen face. A good
householder, when a stage-full of country-cousins came to his door, bade
the driver take them to the hotel, and he would willingly pay the bills.
But few have the courage thus to board out those who have a staff in
their hands to knock at the very gate of their hearts. There would be
satisfaction in the utmost amount of this labor and sacrifice, could we
have any truth for its condition. But the falsehood has been written
down by one whom we can nowise accuse. Alas! there is often as little
truth in the entertainer. All together in the matter are walking in a
vain show. We are at the mercy of a diviner's wand and a conjurer's
spell. We have put on a foolish look of consent and compromise. We join
with our new mate in extolling the wrong-doer who has inflicted him upon
us. We dare not analyze the base alloy of the composition he conveys,
which pretends to be pure gold. We must either act falsely ourselves, or
charge falsehood upon others. We prefer the guilt to seeming unkindness;
when, if we were perfectly good and wise, we should shake off the coil
of deception, refuse insincere favors, and, however infinite and
overflowing our benevolence, insist on doing, in any case, only willing
and authentic good,--for affection is too noble to be feigned. "If,"
said Ole Bull, "I kiss my enemy, what have I left for my friend?" We
must forgive and love our enemies and all men, and show our love by
treating them without dissimulation, but a sublime openness, according
to their needs and deserts.
The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for
all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent
value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have
taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in
discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market
limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but
running through every section of human life. Our _acceptance_ of these
notes is a commercial transaction, not of the fairest sort. It belongs
to a species of trade in which we are made to pay other people's debts,
and our dear friends and intimate relations sell us for some song or
other which has been melodiously chanted into their own ears. "A new way
to pay old debts," indeed! Every part of the bargain or trick of the
game is by the main operators well known and availed of for their own
behoof. By letter, persons have been introduced into circles where they
had no footing, posts for whose responsibilities they were utterly
unfit, and trusts whose funds they showed more faculty to embezzle than
apply. Such licentious proceedings have good-natured concessions to
wrong requests multiplied to the hurt of the commonweal. Let us beware
of this kind of sympathetic lie, which ends in robbery, and swindles
thousands out of what is more important than material property, for the
support of pretenders that are worse than thieves, who are bold enough,
like drones, to break into the hive of the busy and eat the honey they
never gathered, absorbing to themselves, as far as they can, the
courtesy of the useful members of the community by the worst monopoly in
the world.
Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize
the advantage of a right use, of this _introductory_ prerogative. What
more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were
each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the
deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law,
that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always
finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely
greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It
ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or
churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in
circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recipients of
abundant tokens of good-will; and perhaps the familiar instance may have
pardon for its recital, in illustration of the mercy which the
letter-bearer may not seldom find. An epistle from a mutual acquaintance
was our opportunity of intercourse with a venerable bachelor residing in
the city of Antwerp. It was so urged upon us, that the least we could do
was to present it, expecting only a few minutes' agreeable conversation.
Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant
face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon
all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our
expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to
picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the
entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment,
and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to
name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing
memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in
heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late
for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without
note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested
bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine,
which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the
reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation
in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that _we could
see mills in Lowell like those under his own control_. Perhaps, from his
shrewd old head, as he kept his seat at his desk, like a sharp-shooter
on the watch and wary for the foe, he only covered us with the surly
weapon of his tongue in the equitable way for which we have here been
contending ourselves! Certainly we were quite satisfied, if the
Englishman was.
But printed lies, as well as written, are largely sympathetic. We are
bitter against the press; and surely it needs a greater Luther for its
reformer. But its follies are ours; its corruptions belong to its
patrons. The editor of a paper edits the mind of those that take it. He
cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly
borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with
which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in
our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes
or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the
hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while
he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London
"Times," already mentioned, is called the _Thunderer_; but, like the man
behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it
is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods
respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the
cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of
information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more
virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers,
make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others,
among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered
style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and
swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs
prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of
public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the
constituency which the paper represents.
It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens
of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the
prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they
live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have,
among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our
national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets,
historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so
vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding
brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they
pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures
they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote
themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales
of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own
reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not
their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the
world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there
was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name,
whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of
making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will
turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not
inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed,
and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn
away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our
downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our
country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship
of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels
trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as
blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise
the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it
please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good
missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to
California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount
Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other
elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the
Transatlantics may yet behold.
The pulpit is but a sympathetic deceiver, when it violates the truth it
is set to defend. All its lies are echoes of the avarice and inhumanity
sitting in the pews; and when, in the rough old figure, it is a dumb dog
that will not bark at the robber or warn us of danger, the real mutes,
whom its silence but copies, are those demure men below who seem to
listen to its instructions.
We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the
telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human
altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to
carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself
flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military
movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on
either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk
dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates
to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the
community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read
the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human
auditor even of these electric accounts.
But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are,
shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,--there is a sympathy
of truth, to whose higher court and supreme verdict we must appeal.
Before it let us stand ourselves, perpetual witnesses of the very truth
of God in our breast. Said the lion-hearted Andrew Jackson, "When I
decide on my course, I do not ask what people will think, but look into
my own heart for guidance, believing that all brave men will agree with
me."
"As the minister began on the subject of Slavery, I left the church,"
said a respectable citizen to a modest woman, of whose consent with him
he felt sure.
"And did the minister go on?" she gently inquired.
"Yes, he went on," the mistaken citizen replied.
So, in this land, let us go on in the way of justice and truth we have
at last begun. Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies
for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old,
when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have
no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of
the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the
discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a
signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been
falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down.
The domineering political and ecclesiastical usurpers of exclusive
privilege will no longer give and take reciprocal support against the
rising of mankind than the Roman augurs could at last keep one another
in countenance. Let us go on, through dark omens as well as bright, and
suffer ourselves to have no doubting day. Let us show that something
besides a monarchy in this world can stand. On disbelievers and
obstructers let us have companion. They cannot live contented, and it is
not quite safe for them to die. The path of our progress opens clear.
Let us not admit the idea of failure. To think of failing is to fail. As
it was with the sick before their Saviour of old, only our faith can
make us whole.
* * * * *