Well, there are many foolish and some wise, and I, for one, could heartily wish both classes more justly placed; for he who styles me an extreme intrepid democrat pays me a compliment to which I have no claim.  While, then, by “kingship” you meant something human and noble, while I could deem the command you coveted for strong and wise men to be somewhat which should lift the weak and unwise above the range of their own force and intelligence, I held your prophesying in high esteem, and readily pardoned any excesses of expression into which your prophetic afflatus (being Scotch) might betray you.

But your appetite for kingship seems to have gained in strength while it lost in delicacy and moral significance, till it has become an insatiable craving, which disdains not to batten on very vile garbage.  If one rule, and another be ruled, and if the domination be open, frank, and vigorous, you seem to feast on the fact, be this domination as selfish in its nature and as brutal in its form as it may.  Whether its aim be to uplift or to degrade its subjects, whether it be clean or filthy, of heaven or of hell, a stress of generous purpose or a mere emphasis of egotism,—­what pause do you make to inquire concerning this?  The appearance is, that any sovereignty, in these democratic days, is over-welcome to your hunger to admit of pause; and a rule, whose undisguised aim is, not to supplement the strength of the weak, but to pillage them of its product, not to lend the ignorant a wisdom above their own, but to make their ignorance perpetual as a source of pecuniary profit to their masters, may reckon upon your succors whenever succors are needed.

Hence your patronage of our slavery.  Hence your effort to commend it by a description so incomparably false, that, though one should laugh derision at it from Christmas to Candlemas, he would not laugh enough.  “Hiring servants for life,”—­that is the most intrepid lucus a non lucendo of the century.  It fairly takes one’s breath away.  It is stunning, ravishing.  One can but cry, on recovering his wind,—­Hear, O Caucus, and give ear, O Mock-Auction! ye railway Hudsons, tricksters, impostors, ye demagogues that love the people in stump-speeches at $——­ per year, ye hired bravos of the bar that stab justice in the dark, ye Jesuit priests that “lie for God,” listen all, and learn how to do it!  What are your timid devices, compared with this of benumbing your adversary at the start by an outright electric shock of untruth?  But a man must be supported by a powerful sense of sincerity to be capable of a statement so royally false that the truth itself shall look tame and rustic beside it.