Page:The Barbarism of Slavery - Sumner - 1863.pdf/47

 41 is where a scene of transcendent virtue is described as sculptured in "visible speech" on the long gallery which led to the

Heavenly Gate. The poet felt the inspiration of the scene, and it on the way-side, where it could charm and encourage. This was natural. Nobody can look upon virtue and justice, if it be only in images and pictures, without feeling a kindred sentiment. Nobody can be surrounded by vice and wrong, by violence and brutality, if it be only in images and pictures, without coming under their degrading influence. Nobody can live with the one without advantage; nobody can live with the other placed

without loss. Who could pass his life in the secret chamber where are gathered the impure relics of Pompeii, without becoming indifferent to loathsome things?

But

if these

things are not merely sculptured and painted,

—

if

loathsome

they exist in

they enact their hideous capers in life, as in while the lash plays and the blood spirts while women are whipped and children are sold while marriage is polluted and annulled while the parental tie is rudely torn while honest gains are filched or robbed while the soul itself is shut down in all the darkness of ignorance, and while God himself is defied in the pretension that man can have property in his fellow-man if all these things are present, not merely in images and pictures, but in reality, living reality

if

the criminal pretensions of Slavery

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on character must be incalculable. law that men are fashioned by what is about them, whether climate, scenery, life or institutions. Like produces like, and this ancient proverb is verified always. Look at the miner, delving low down in darkness, and the mountaineer, ranging on airy heights, and you •will see a conThe difference trast in character, and even in personal form. between a coward and a hero may be traced in the atmosphere which each has breathed and how much more in the instituIf institutions genetions under which each has been reared. rous and just ripen souls also generous and just, then other inViolence, brutality, stitutions must exhibit their influence also. injustice, barbarism, must be reproduced in the lives of all who The meat that is eaten by man live within their fatal sphere. enters into and becomes a part of his body the madder which and the Slavery on is eaten by a dog changes his bones to red which men live, in all its five-fold foulness, must become a part their influence

It is according to irresistible