And there was a time when many Virginians, now living, began to see this; and had they been let alone, not many years would have passed before we should have freed ourselves from the weight that oppressed us. But in an evil hour there arose a handful of men with a mission,—a mission to keep other people’s consciences,—often—as certain national moral phenomena subsequently showed—to the neglect of that charity which begins at home. From that day all rational discussion of the question became impossible in Virginia; and a consummation for which many of the wisest heads were quietly laboring became odious even to hint at, under dictation from outsiders; and on the day when the first abolition society was formed, the fates registered a decree that slavery should go down; not in peace, but by war; not quietly and gradually extinguished, with the consent of all concerned, but with convulsive violence,—drowned in the blood of a million men, and the tears of more than a million women. Well, they were only white men and women,—so let that pass, too. ----- [1] Obviously, as often elsewhere, Mr. Whacker here says _Virginians_, instead of _Southerners_, to avoid all semblance of sectional feeling. [2] Written, doubtless, before the death of “The Master.”—_Ed._ [3] In my capacity of Bushwhacker, I make it a matter of business to laugh whenever I feel like it. I felt like it when, on reading the above, this parallelism occurred to me: the hero of the “Miserables”—Jean Valjean—is a thief. Now, holds our author, whenever a man is so unfortunate as to be a thief, no blame should be attached to him,—and he puts it about thus: “A thief is not a thief. Nor a crime. He is a product. A fact. A titanic fact. A thief is a man who hears the cry of a child. It is his child. It is a cry for bread. Society gives him a stone. Effacement of his rectitude. He appropriates society’s wallet. And serves society right; for ’tis society has made him a thief.”