le murder; and for a couple of years see its own children
murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day,
considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of
cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the
wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail
for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their
hundreds or thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's
savings, to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have
no control," with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be
bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up
and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and
altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common
highwayman's demand of "your money _or_ your life," into that of "your
money _and_ your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of
its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted
out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra
per week to its landlords;[8] and then debate, with driveling tears,
and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and
nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation
having made up its mind that hanging is quite the wholesomest process
for its homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish between
the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp like a pack of
frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or
gray-haired clodpate Othello, "perplexed i' the extreme," at the very
moment that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite
speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their father's
sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country
butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not
mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a revelation whith
asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at
the same time, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all
chief national deeds and measures, by no other love.

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading.
We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all
events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a
people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is
intelligi