, but
it is true. Besides, servants do sometimes steal. And little foreign
blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty. Why
should it? Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern
slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to
exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of
intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty
and ignorance,--why should they tell the truth or respect property?
Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural and necessary
weapon of weakness. Their falsehood is their resistance, in the only
form that weakness can use, evasion instead of force. Their theft is the
taking of what is instinctively felt to be due; their gratification
of an instinct after justice; done secretly because they have not the
strength to demand openly. Such things are unnecessary in America,
no doubt. But habits survive emigration. They are to be deplored,
charitably and hopefully and tenderly cured as diseases, not attacked
and furiously struck and thrust at as wild beasts. Thus it might be with
Bridget, notwithstanding her great, clear, innocent eyes, and open,
honest ways. If she had grown up to think such doings harmless, she
would have no conscience about it. Conscience is very pliant to
education. It troubles no man for what he is trained to do.

So I felt these stories. I could not find it in my heart to talk to poor
Bridget about it. I could not tell her large-hearted old mother. This
reluctance was entirely involuntary, an instinct. I wish I had felt it
more clearly and obeyed it altogether! There is some fatal cloud of
human circumstance that covers up from our sight our just instinctive
perceptions,--makes us drive them out before the mechanical conclusions
of mere reason; and when our reason, our special human pride, has failed
us, we say in our sorrow, I see now; if I had only trusted my first
impulse!--What is this cloud? Is it original sin? I asked my husband.
He was writing his sermon. He stopped and told me with serious
interest,--"This cloud is that original or inbred sin which we receive
from Adam; obscuring and vitiating the free exercise of the originally
perfect faculties; wilting them down, as it were, from a high native
assimilation to the operative methods of the Divine Mind, to the
painful, creeping, mechanical procedures of the comparing and judging
reason. And this lost power is to be restored