Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/117

112 much difference between the joys of such as betwixt the Dundreary skip of a fop and fool, a ninny, or idiot, and the joyous romp of a gushing-hearted, brainful girl.

It has been my lot to encounter a great deal more of human pinch-beck than the solid soul-ful gold; not that I have not known some noble and glorious people among the radical classes, I for years associated with; yet, as a general rule, I found it unsafe to trust to the honor of those who were extreme in the business of world-bettering; they are a bad breed; and Diogenes' lantern is still needed by whomsoever travels among them.

A happy man never writes a book! This is my twentieth! But I might have been happy had I kept away from the world-saving "Philosophers." Here and there I have met a real lady or gentleman, such as that king of nature's nobleman, Jesse B. Furguson, of Tennessee—God bless his green and pleasant memory!—and latterly a few others of the same State; but among professional reformers—and I speak only of such as I personally know, I found a few golden ingots, and a plentiful surplusage of brass ones—born malcontents who take to world-saving, themselves needing it most by far. Such people as preach divine charity and all that, yet constantly yelp and howl down to the bitter depths of death, slander or disgrace, any and every human being whom they cannot use at will, or who disagrees with them. They are magnificent demonstrations of the sublime truth of the philosophy I teach, viz., that as was a person's anti-natal circumstances, so will his or her subsequent life be. If begotten in lust, alone, then that will be their bias from the breast to the grave; if of "authority" backed by brute force, on the body of half-dead compliance, then such will go through life, biting, barking, snarling, growling, making all sorts of trouble; incapable either of generosity or appreciation, and scattering discord wherever their scandal-scattering footsteps fall;—generally, long, lean, lank, slab-sided human halfness, one or more of whom infests nearly every neighborhood. Thus in close juxtaposition with nature's noblemen, I have never failed to meet men of souls so contemptibly small as to make one ashamed of the form one wore. Who would naturally have dreamed, surmised, or indeed have ever