reformers. "If an angry bigot assumes the bountiful cause of abolition,
and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
to him: 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and
modest; have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
off!'"

He does not shrink from questioning the validity of some of our pet
institutions, as, for instance, universal suffrage. He reminds us that in
old Egypt the vote of a prophet was reckoned equal to one hundred hands,
and records his opinion that it was much underestimated. "Shall we, then,"
he asks, "judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the
minority, surely! 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by
square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the
time." The majority are unripe, and do not yet know their own opinion. He
would not, however, counsel an organic alteration in this respect,
believing that, with the progress of enlightenment, such coarse
constructions of human rights will adjust themselves. He concedes the
sagacity of the Fultons and Watts of politics, who, noticing that the
opinion of the million was the terror of the world, grouped it on a level,
instead of piling it into a mountain, and so contrived to make of this
terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State. But, again, he
would not have us regard the State as a finality, or as relieving any man
of his individual responsibility for his actions and purposes. We are to
confide in God--and not in our money, and in the State because it is guard
of it. The Union itself has no basis but the good pleasure of the majority
to be united. The wise and just men impart strength to the State, not
receive it; and, if all went down, they and their like would soon combine
in a new and better constitution. Yet he will not have us forget that only
by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing so weak as an egotist. We are