Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v1.djvu/313

Rh powerful, make use of the moment you stretch out your hand to place a penny in it; and in your hour of need they make you a slave, and a slave of the worst kind,—the slave of an act of charity; a slave forced to love the enslaver. What infamy! what want of delicacy! what a blow to your self-respect! Then all is over. You are condemned for life to consider this man good, that woman beautiful; to approve, to applaud, to admire, to worship; to prostrate yourself; to blister your knees by long genuflections; to sugar your words when you are gnawing your lips with anger, when you are smothering your cries of fury, and when you have within you more savage turbulence and more bitter foam than the ocean! It is thus that the rich make slaves of the poor. The slime of this good action performed towards you bedaubs and bespatters you with mud for evermore.

The acceptance of alms is irremediable. Gratitude is paralyzing. A benefit has a sticky and repugnant adherence which deprives you of free movement. Those odious, opulent, and spoiled creatures whose pity has thus injured you are well aware of this. It is done,—you are their creature; they have bought you! How? By a bone taken from their dog and cast to you! they have flung the bone at your head; you have been stoned as well as fed. It is all one. Have you gnawed the bone, —yes or no? You have had your place in the dog-kennel just the same; then be thankful,—be eternally thankful. Adore your masters; kneel on indefinitely. A benefit implies an understood inferiority accepted by you. It means that you feel them to be gods and yourself a poor devil. Your humiliation increases their importance; your cringing form makes theirs seem more upright; there is an impertinent inflection in the very tones of their voices. Their family matters, their marriages, their baptisms, their child-bearings, their