Westlake's deep red deepened. "I leave religious matters to those whose charge it is. I have been instructed to hold the place which has been awarded me, without asking why I have been made to differ from others. And the teaching which is good enough for me is, I suppose, good enough for my servants. As for the rest, we know that our people are as well off as the same class in any part of the world, not excepting New England." "I dare say such a class would be no better off there than here. But come and learn for yourself how it is there." "I could not learn there how to live here. And I do not pretend that we can understand you better than you can us. But, Borrow, you are hard to suit. You twit us with our waste and improvidence, and yet you are not better pleased with Rasey, who follows gain like a New-Englander." "Rasey follows gain from the blind impulse of covetousness. The New-Englander's zeal is according to knowledge. Rasey's greed is the inherited hunger of a precarious race. The New-Englander thrives because he has always thriven. He has in his veins 'the custom of prosperity.' "Fuller tells us, that, in his time, 'a strict inquiry after the ancient gentry of England' would have found 'most of them in the class moderately mounted above the common level'; the more ambitious having suffered ruin in the national turmoils, while these even-minded men, 'through God's blessing on their moderation, have continued in their condition.' It was from this old stock that the planters of New England were chiefly derived, mingled with them some strong scions of loftier trees." "Do we not know that there is no such thing as birth in New England? There, even if a man had ancestry, he would not dare to think himself the better for it." "Disabuse yourself; the New-Englander is perfectly human in this respect, and only a very little wiser than the rest of the world. But he disapproves waste, even of so cheap a thing as words: he does not speak of his blood, because his blood speaks for itself. "Rasey thinks whatever is held by others to be so much withheld from him. To make what is theirs his is all his aim. He has no conception of a creative wealth, of a diffusive prosperity. To live and make live is an aristocratic maxim. Rasey, and such as he, grudge almost the subsistence of their human tools. With the New-Englander, parsimony is not economy. The aristocratic household law is a liberal one, and it is his. He lives up to his income as conscientiously as within it. Rasey and his like think what is theirs, enjoyed by another, wasted;--they think it wasted, enjoyed by themselves. The New-Englander's rule of personal indulgence is the same with that given to the Persian prince Ghilan by his father, the wise Kyekyawus, who, warning him against squandering, adds, 'It is not squandering to spend for anything which can be of real use to thee either in this world or the next.'