Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/428

 and hour by hour, throughout the civilized world, sympathy diminishes for you, the oppressors, and sympathy increases for your oppressed victims, becoming, as they do, day by day, not by a figure of speech, merely, or by a pedigree derived from Adam, but as a matter of notorious and contemporary fact, more and more your brethren, flesh of your flesh, and blood of your blood.

Can you stand the finger of scorn pointed at you by all the civilized world?

Can you stand the still, small voice of conscience, day by day, and hour by hour, reëchoing in your own hearts those uncomfortable epithets — slave driver, slave breeder, slave hunter, dough face?

As to you, graybeards in iniquity, with hearts seared, faith blighted, hope withered, and love dried up, continue, if you will, you and your Aaron, to bow down to the golden calf that first seduced you!

It is your sin, your weakness, your want of faith, that have kept your nation wandering this forty years in the wilderness. With imaginations too dull and gross to raise you to the height of any mental Mount Pisgah; incapable to see, even in your mind's eye, the distant prospect of good things to come; longing secretly in your hearts to return to the fleshpots of Egypt; well content to make bricks for the Pharaohs; yourselves slaves hardly less than those whom you oppress; cowardly souls, frightened by tales of giants and lions, it were vain to expect that you should ever enter the promised land; cravens, fit only to die and to rot in the wilderness!

But already is coming forward a new generation, to whom justice will be something more than a mere empty sound; something as imperiously forced upon them by their own sense of right, as by the clamors and demands of those who suffer. In vain do your priests and your politicians labor to extinguish, in the minds of the rising generation, the idea of any Law higher than their own wicked bargains and disgraceful enactments. When to uphold slavery