Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/239

 the thumbs of the multitude were turned down, and we witnessed the tragedy of men who but a short while before had been praised and lauded for their possessions, and used as models for little boys in Sunday-school, suddenly stripped of all their coveted garments, and held up to the hatred and ridicule of a world that can yet think of nothing better than the stocks, the pillory, the jail, and the scaffold.

In Edinburgh I was shown a little church of which Sir Walter Scott was once a vestryman, or deacon or elder or some such official, and in the door still hung the irons in which offenders were fastened on Sunday mornings so that the righteous, as they went to pray, might comfort themselves with a consoling sense of their own goodness by spitting in the face of the sinner. Many of our reforms are still carried on in this spirit, and are no more sensible or productive of good.

The word "reformer," like the word "politician" has degenerated, and, in the mind of the common man, come to connote something very disagreeable. In four terms as mayor I came to know both species pretty well, and, in the later connotations of the term, I prefer the politician. He, at least, is human. The reformers, as Emerson said, affect one as the insane do; their motives may be pious, but their methods are profane. They are a buzz in the ear.

I had read this in Emerson in my youth, when for a long time I had a veritable passion for him, just as in a former stage, and another mood, I had had a veritable passion for books about Napoleon, and,