No amount of
eloquence, no sheen of official position, no loud grief of partisan
friends, would ever lead us to ask monuments or walk in fine processions
for pirates; and the sectarian zeal or selfish ambition which gives up,
deliberately and in full knowledge of the facts, three million of human
beings to hopeless ignorance, daily robbery, systematic prostitution,
and murder, which the law is neither able nor undertakes to prevent
or avenge, is more monstrous, in our eyes, than the love of gold which
takes a score of lives with merciful quickness on the high seas. Haynau
on the Danube is no more hateful to us than Haynau on the Potomac. Why
give mobs to one and monuments to the other?
If these things be necessary to courtesy, I cannot claim that we are
courteous. We seek only to be honest men, and speak the same of the dead
as of the living. If the grave that hides their bodies could swallow
also the evil they have done and the example they leave, we might enjoy
at least the luxury of forgetting them.
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