bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at
home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of
_reptilia_ in other latitudes.
—Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that
in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher?
No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India,—a white,
superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still
“Caucasian” race,—and where are English and American sympathies? We
can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the
brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it
is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the
brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals,—tame it
or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children
outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the
babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has
girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] _Dele_. The
civilized world says, Amen.
—Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that I
should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute
it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and water my
remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with their _melas
oinos_,—that black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used to alloy with
three parts or more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been
_melasses_, as Webster and his provincials spell it,—or _Molossa’s_, as
dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton
Mather, has it in the “Magnalia”? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries
who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in “Notes and Queries!”—ye
Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend
the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!—ye Amines of
parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with
a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great
minds Goethe speaks of, you have “made a Golgotha” of your pages!—ponder
thereon!]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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