literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital
of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs
into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate
in words. Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an
Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and
still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight
than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives,
strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all
quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be
but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential
meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be
a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation
from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the
great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite,
and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.

It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will
naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing
and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be
remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those
movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and
generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be
malignant because other men's conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar
insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of
the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and
educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles,
should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the
narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is
righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which
Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example