Harriet Martineau

“ There is no fear that the majority will ultimately succumb to the minority,—the harmonious law to the discordant anomaly: but it is a fearful thing, meantime, that the brave should be oppressed by the mercenary, and oppressed in proportion to their bravery; that the masters of black slaves in the south should be allowed to make white slaves in the north; that power and wealth should be used to blind the people to the nature and dignity of the law, and to seduce them into a preference of brute force. ”

“ The valley of the Connecticut is the most fertile valley in New England; and it is scarcely possible that any should be more beautiful. The river, full, broad, and tranquil as the summer sky, winds through meadows, green with pasture, or golden with corn. Clumps of forest trees afford retreat for the cattle in the summer heats; and the magnificent New England elm, the most graceful of trees, is dropped singly, here and there, and casts its broad shade upon the meadow. Hills of various height and declivity bound the now widening, now contracting valley. To these hills, the forest has retired ”

“ The Union does not forbid men to act according to their convictions. The Union has never depended for its existence on hypocrisy, insult, and injury; and it never will.
Let citizens but take heed individually to respect the law, and see that others do,—that no neighbour transgresses it, that no statesman despises it unrebuked, that no child grows up ignorant or careless of it; and the Union is as secure as the ground they tread upon. If this be not done, everything is in peril, for the season; not only the Union, but property, home, life and integrity. ”

“ Too many gentlemen and ladies analyze nothing at all. If better taught, and introduced at an early age into the world of analysis, nothing, in the whole course of education, is probably so striking to their minds. They begin a fresh existence from the day when they first obtain a glimpse into this new region of discovery.
Such an era is the traveller's entrance upon the wilder regions of America. His old experience is all reversed. He sees nothing of art in its entireness; but little of nature in her instrumentality. Nature is there the empress, not the handmaid. ”

“ If citizens regulate their exertions by the probabilities of immediate success, instead of by their faith in their own convictions, it is indeed no wonder if the minority leave everything to their adversaries; but this is not the way for men to show themselves worthy of the possession of political rights. This is not the way that society has advanced. This is not the way that security for life and property has been obtained for those idle citizens who are now leaving that security to the mercy of those whom they believe to be the enemies of society. ”

“ Foot-hold after foot-hold is destined to be thrown down, till, after more ages than the world has yet known, the last rocky barrier shall be overpowered, and an ocean shall overspread countries which are but just entering upon civilized existence. Niagara itself is but one of the shifting scenes of life, like all of the outward that we hold most permanent. Niagara itself, like the systems of the sky, is one of the hands of Nature's clock, moving, though too slowly to be perceived by the unheeding,—still moving, to mark the lapse of time. ”

“ Lafayette, on his last visit to the United States, expressed his astonishment at the increase of the prejudice against colour. He remembered, he said, how the black soldiers used to mess with the whites in the revolutionary war. The leaders of that war are gone where principles are all,—where prejudices are nothing. If their ghosts could arise, in majestic array, before the American nation, on their great anniversary, and hold up before them the mirror of their constitution, in the light of its first principles, where would the people hide themselves from the blasting radiance? ”

“ It has thus obviously become the interest of all to whom slavery still is, or is believed to be, a gain; of those who hold the richest lands; of those who rear slaves for such lands; of all who dread change; of all who would go quietly through life, and leave it to a future generation to cope with their difficulty,—it has become the interest of all such to turn their own attention and that of others from the fact that the time has come when the slaves ought to be made free labourers. They cannot put down the fact into utter silence. Some sort of compromise must be made with it. ”

“ We are freemen, sprung from a noble stock of freemen, able to boast as noble a line of ancestry as ever graced this earth;—we have burning in our bosoms the spirit of freemen—live in an age of enlightened freedom, and in a country blessed with its privileges—under a government that has pledged itself to protect us in the enjoyment of our peculiar domestic institutions in peace, and undisturbed. ”

“ Every day which passes over the unredressed wrongs of any class which a republic holds in her bosom; every day which brings persecution on those who act out the principles which all profess; every day which adds a sanction to brute force, and impairs the sacredness of law; every day which prolongs impunity to the oppressor and discouragement to the oppressed, is a more evil day than that which should usher in the work of renovation.
But the dictum is not true. This bitter satire upon the constitution, and upon all who have complacently lived under it, is not true. ”

“ In Europe, desperate, brutal ignorance is the deepest curse in the cursed life of the pauper and the serf. In Europe, mobbing is usually the outbreak of exasperated misery against laws which oppress, and an aristocracy which insults humanity. Europeans, therefore, naturally assume that the gentry of the United States are the sinned against, and the poor the sinners, in their social disturbances. They draw conclusions against popular government, and suppose it proved that universal suffrage dissolves society into chaos. ”

“ If a glance is cast over the assemblage called to the ordeal, how mean and trivial are the vociferations in defence of property, the threats of revenge for light, the boast of physical force, the appeal to the compromises which constitute the defects of human law! How low and how sad appear the mercenary interests, the social fears, the clerical blindness or cowardice, the morbid fastidiousness of those who, professing the same principles with the abolitionists, are bent upon keeping those principles for ever an abstraction! ”

“ In the drawing-room, the piazza, the barouche, all is so gay and friendly, there is such a prevailing hilarity and kindness, that it seems positively ungrateful and unjust to pronounce, even in one's own heart, that all this way of life is full of wrong and peril. Yet it is impossible to sit down to reflect, with every order of human beings filling an equal space before one's mental eye, without being struck to the soul with the conviction that the state of society, and no less of individual families, is false and hollow, whether their members are aware of it or not ”

“ It is a sensation worth knowing, to feel oneself imprisoned in the very heart of a mountain, miles from the sun-light, and with no mode of escape but the imperceptible hole which a child might block up in five minutes. Never was there a more magnificent prison or sepulchre. Whether the singularity of our mode of access magnified to our eyes the beauties we had thereby come into the midst of, or whether Nature does work most con amore in retired places, this grotto seemed to us all by far the most beautiful part of the cave. ”

“ The prospects of agriculture in the States north-west of the Ohio are brilliant. The stranger who looks upon the fertile prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and the rich alluvions of Ohio, feels the iniquity of the English corn laws as strongly as in the alleys of Sheffield and Manchester. The inhuman perverseness of taxing food is there evident in all its enormity. The world ought never to hear of a want of food,—no one of the inhabitants of its civilised portions ought ever to be without the means of obtaining his fill, while the mighty western valley smiles in its fertility. ”

“ A magic ring seems drawn round those who live amidst slavery; and it gives a circular character to all they think and say and do upon the subject. There are but few who sit within it who distinctly see anything beyond it. If there were but any one moral giant within, who would heave a blow at it with all the force of a mighty principle, it would be shattered to atoms in a moment; and the white and black slaves it encloses would be free at once. ”

“ But it so happens, wherever there is an anomaly, giant minds rise up to overthrow it: minds gigantic, not in understanding, but in faith. Wherever they arise, they are the salt of their earth, and its corruption is retrieved. So it is now in America. While the mass of common men and women are despising, and disliking, and fearing, and keeping down the coloured race, blinking the fact that they are citizens, the few of Nature's aristocracy are putting forth a strong hand to lift up this degraded race out of oppression, and their country from the reproach of it. ”

“ By the time that we shall be enabled to say the same of the parishes of Ireland, the Americans will, doubtless, have discovered that they would be glad of all the labourers we had ever been able to spare; if only we could send them in the form of respectable men and women, instead of squalid paupers, looking as if they were going from shore to shore, to rouse the world to an outcry against the sins and sorrows of our economy. ”

“ God only knows what it is the part of wise men to do on that momentous and appalling subject. Of this I am very sure, that the difference—nothing short of frightful—between all that exists on one side of the Potomac, and all on the other, is owing to that cause alone. The disease is deep seated; it is at the heart's core; it is consuming, and has all along been consuming, our vitals; and I could laugh, if I could laugh on such a subject, at the ignorance and folly of the politician who ascribes that to an act of the government, which is the inevitable effect of the eternal laws of nature. ”

“ The older they grow, the more must they "reverence the dreams of their youth." They must eschew the folly and profaneness so prevalent in the old world, of exalting man, abstractedly and individually, as a piece of God's creation, and despising men in the mass. The statesman in a London theatre feels his heart in a tumult, while a deep amen echoes through its chambers at Hamlet's adoration of humanity; but not the less, when he goes home, does he speak slightingly, compassionately, or protectingly of the masses, the population, the canaille. ”

“ In a country, the fundamental principle of whose politics is, that its "rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," it is clear that there can be no narrowing of the suffrage. However earnestly some may desire this, no one hopes it. But it does not follow that the apprehensive minority has nothing left but discontent. The enlightenment of society remains not only matter for hope, but for achievement. The prudent speak of the benefits of education as a matter of policy, while the philanthropic promote it as a matter of justice. ”

“ It was amusing to hear the praises of corn (Indian corn) in the midst of the richest cotton, rice, and tobacco districts. The Indian looks with silent wonder upon the settler, who becomes visibly a capitalist in nine months, on the same spot where the red man has remained equally poor, all his life. In February, both are alike bare of all but land, and a few utensils. By the end of the next November, the white settler has his harvest of corn; more valuable to him than gold and silver. It will procure him many things which they could not. A man who has corn, may have everything. ”

“ I had been less than three weeks in the country, and was in a state of something like awe at the prevalence of, not only external competence, but intellectual ability. The striking effect upon a stranger of witnessing, for the first time, the absence of poverty, of gross ignorance, of all servility, of all insolence of manner, cannot be exaggerated in description. I had seen every man in the towns an independent citizen; every man in the country a land-owner. I had seen that the villages had their newspapers, the factory girls their libraries. ”

“ I think the abolitionists of the United States the most reasonable set of people that I ever knew to be united together for one object. Among them may be enjoyed the high and rare luxury of having a reason rendered for every act performed, and every opinion maintained. The treatment they have met with compels them to be more thoroughly informed, and more completely assured on every point on which they commit themselves, than is commonly considered necessary on the right side of a question, where there is the strength of a mighty principle to repose upon. ”

“ There must be something sound in the principles on which these people differ from the rest of the world, or they would not work at all; but the little that is vital is dreadfully encumbered with that which is dead. Like all religious persuasions from which one differs, that of the Shakers appears more reasonable in conversation, and in their daily actions, than on paper and at a distance. In actual life, the absurd and peculiar recedes before the true and universal; but, I own, I have never witnessed more visible absurdity than in the way of life of the Shakers. ”

“ We slept till one o'clock, and then set off in a stage and four for the cave. My expectations had been so excited, that every object on the road seemed to paint itself on my very spirit; and I now feel as if I saw the bright hemp fields, the oak copses, the gorgeous wild flowers, and clear streams, running over their limestone beds, that adorned our short journey.
The house at the cave stands on the greenest sward that earth and dews can produce; and it grows up to the very walls of the dwelling. ”

“ In England, the differences of parties are so broad,—between those who would have the people governed for the convenience of their rulers; those who would have the many governed, for their good, by the will of the few; and those who would have the people govern themselves;—that it is, for some time, difficult to comprehend how there should be party differences as wide in a country where the first principle of government is that the people are to govern themselves. ”

“ If a revolution were to take place to-morrow in the United States, it remains an historical fact that, for half a century, a people has been self-governed; and, till it can be proved that the self-government is the cause of the instability, no revolution, or series of revolutions, can tarnish the lustre, any more than they can impair the soundness of the principle that mankind are capable of self-government. ”