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 RESPONSIBILITY AFFECTS JUDGMENT

Judge Collamore, who for many years was a distinguished United States Senator from Vermont, used to illustrate his troubles by this story:

He was sitting on the porch of his law office during a recess of Congress, when a farmer drove by and said, "Judge, my conscience troubles me so I can not sleep, about keeping four millions of fellow human beings with the same souls and the same Creator as ourselves in slavery. With all this wealth, I am sure that we, as a nation and as a people individually, will be curst unless slavery is abolished. Now, it is hardly fair to destroy the property of the South, who are not directly responsible, and so I think we ought to all bear our share and buy them out."

Senator Collamore replied: "Well, in part I think you are right. Now, let's see practically how it works out. The estimated price is four thousand millions of dollars. It would have to be raised by a direct tax proportioned among the States. Vermont's share would be so many millions. This county, so many hundreds of thousands, this town so many tens of thousands." Sitting in the same place the next afternoon, and greeting friends as they passed to and from the market, the old Puritan farmer reappeared. Reining up his horses, he shouted: "Judge, I have been thinking over that question. Crops are poor, taxes are high; I don't think we need bother just at present about them infernal niggers."

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RESPONSIBILITY EVADED

When the Massachusetts Sixth was there in Baltimore and being mobbed, and stood for a long time perfectly patient till their officers commanded them to fire, a long Yankee—who had stood watching this crowd and saw that the poor ruffians round about were merely the tools of the respectable scoundrels standing away across the square on boxes and barrels—stept out from the ranks and drew his bead and sent a bullet through one scoundrel's heart, and knocked him like a pigeon off a branch. In Baltimore I heard the other side of that story, when a clergyman of that city told me, "We lost a good deal out of our church that day." "Ah?" said I, "how was that?" "Well, one of the class-leaders of our church was down there looking-on. He stood on a box on the other side of the square; he was not among the crowd at all, but a stray bullet came across the end of the square and shot him!" He was one of those broadclothed scoundrels, with a gold-headed cane, surrounding those poor fellows, and ought to have been shot.—

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Responsibility for Others—See.

RESPONSIBILITY OF GREATNESS

Does some Napoleon "wade through slaughter to a throne, and shut the gates of mercy on mankind," and break the hearts of a million peasant women, and handicap the careers of ten millions of orphan children? Recently when I used Napoleon in an address as an illustration of unbridled and selfish ambition, and spoke of him as a man raised up to correct the abuses of the French Revolution, who ought to have imitated Washington and Jefferson, and as a man of patriotism all compact concluded his career without a mixture of meanness and sin, a score of people wrote protesting against judging Napoleon by the ordinary standards of morality. Does Goethe forget the law of marriage? For thirty years cast the reins loose on the neck of passion? Use a score of women as material and dynamic for literary work? It is said Goethe was too great to be held down to the ordinary petty rules that control the limited career of peasant souls. Does Byron forget the law of sobriety, and fling himself into wild excesses and lift the cup of flame to his lips? It is said that Byron is a child of genius, quite beyond the pale of convention. Does some Crœsus with the money-making gift get his hands on the reins of power use his secret knowledge to secure exemption from taxes and enjoy special privileges, freeing himself from economic duties that his competitors must bear, not only for themselves alone but for him? The excuse is that the moral laws that hold for those that buy and sell a few pounds of groceries are to be laid on the table and abrogated in the presence of the merchant princes owning uncounted millions.

The biographies of great men are filled with excuses for great generals who have been selfish, of poets who have been wild and lawless, apologies for statesmen who have been drunken, merchants who have been false. And the whole world has suffered through this misconception. As men go toward greatness they go toward respon