Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/271

 This personal feeling is Common Sense. The other is Public Opinion. The last is always wrong; the other is always right. The individual is generally just, the community very seldom. Public opinion is, there-fore, a mere physical power; and as such, eternally changes. Common sense, on the contrary, ever and always accretes and intensifies, spreads and grows stronger as the years and people pass away; the one is accidental and material; the other, personal, constitutional, and real. Now take a couple of other men, constituted precisely as was our soldier: let them, each for himself, commit a genteel murder; one gets caught at it and is strung up and choked to death in a period of time, varying from four to twenty minutes; choked till his eyes bulge out, his tongue lolls thick and swollen from his mouth—by a fellow who gets paid for the job. Society says this is right as Society; but take every one that composes it aside, and let him look on that blue-black throat, at those bulging eye-balls, contorted features, and ghastly carrion; ten thousand to one. that every man of them will denounce this legal choking affair as a damnable piece of buisness, totally unworthy of a savage, much less civilized (?) men and women. Here you see the thing is material—is the monstrous out-creation of the social body, and not at all related to man, as an individual. How happens this out-creation of the body-politic to be so terrible? just go back a few pages and you will see that "the out-creation always corresponds to the condition of the being whence it emanates." The great mass is barbarous to-day; and civilization, much less Spiritualization, is the exception to the general rule and order. Bye-and-bye 12