Line of Demarcation

“ Custom, law, and all the paraphernalia of civilization, had set the division and marked the boundary between them,—had forbidden the lesser in world’s rank to speak to the greater, unless the greater began conversation,—had equally forbidden the greater to speak to the lesser lest such condescension should inflate the lesser’s vanity so much as to make him obnoxious to his fellows. ”

“ Would each act on the other at all, to modify its peculiarities and broaden its view of life? To take another simile, would such a vein of molten, fiery, nineteenth century individuality, operating vertically, do other than shatter the superincumbent, horizontal social beds? ”

“ All outside of this circle are regarded as of no account; and those who are opposed to those in the circle and to their evils are accounted as enemies, whatever their character may be, however wise, upright, honest, or just. ”

“ Truth now comes to us in such small segments that we no longer see the pattern of it; but this we are able to perceive: that the mystery of Separation is equal in degree with the mystery of Union, and that the child of separation is Pain. ”

“ This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. ”

“ But one thing I could never understand,—why those who are so horror-stricken at the idea of theoretic amalgamation, should exhibit to the world, in all their cities, on all their plantations, and in all their households, such numberless proofs of practical amalgamation. ”

“ Something imperial, or imperious, threw A chain o'er all she did; that is, a chain Was thrown as 't were about the neck of you,— And rapture's self will seem almost a pain With aught which looks like despotism in view: Our souls at least are free, and 't is in vain We would against them make the flesh obey— The spirit in the end will have its way. ”

“ When they have wished to depress and subjugate a race they have slammed the doors of their history on them, and left them alone, spiritless and forlorn, passed by and forgotten by the Ages, despised of themselves and of their neighbours. ”

“ The striving after distinction is the striving after ascendancy over one's neighbour, be it only a very indirect one, or one only felt or dreamt of. There are many stages in this secretly-desired ascendancy, and a complete record of the same would be identical with a history of civilisation, from the first antics of barbarism up to the caricature of over-refinement and morbid idealism. ”

“ Following their own selfish purposes they create discord wherever they go. Their plots take all kinds of forms, which are as numerous as the hair on our heads. By all that is good and pure: came this devilish race in our land? ”

“ Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. ”

“ The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us, and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish. The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter—all make us smile, but all pain us. ”

“ O suffering, toiling France, thy toil is vain!
The irreversible decree stands sure,
Where men are selfish, covetous of gain,
Heady and fierce, unholy and impure,
Their toil is lost, and fruitless all their pain;
They cannot build a work which shall endure. ”

“ The extravagance of human life and labour, the indifference to suffering, the harshness and the infinite class segregation of human society are the result. The use of what I have called conscious direction is apparently the only means whereby this chaos can be converted into organized structure. ”

“ Everything that departs from or curtails this dominion, may it be valued and praised under whatever name, such as decency or skill, knowledge or art, is malformation, false in its foundation and pernicious in its effects. ”

“ The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. ”

“ The visible order among ourselves undertakes at the most that they shall change hands, and the meagreness and indignity of this doom affect them as a betrayal just in proportion as they have grown great. ”

“ Who that claims there is exaggeration is fitted by his lack of prejudice to do the work of separation?
Is it not true that the claim of exaggeration is merely an assumption, and based entirely upon preconceived theories of critics whose opinions vary with their prejudices? ”

“ Many other falls we shall have record of, and in most of them segregation is the great mystery. A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force. Segregation of things that have fallen from the sky has been avoided as most deep-dyed of the damned. ”

“ Then, there is the separation regulation, dragging after it a long train of horrors and heart-rending sufferings—violating the law of holy writ—"Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder"—and trampling upon the best feelings of human nature. ”

“ When you [pg 255] come within the power of an evil sphere, it endeavors to absorb your individuality, and to assimilate you entirely to itself. If you approach the sphere of spiritual pride and self-righteousness, unless you are under divine protection, you will become proud and self-righteous. Approach the sphere of ambition, and you become fired with the insatiable lust of dominion. Approach the sphere of sensuality, and your heart, blood, brain, are all set on fire with hell. ”

“ This hath produced a formed and settled division between those who profess the same doctrine and discipline; while they who call themselves moderate, are forced to widen their bottom, by sacrificing their principles and their brethren, to the incroachments and insolence of dissenters; who are therefore answerable, as a principal cause of all that hatred and animosity flow reigning among us. ”

“ Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment. The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life #4. ”

“ Cry out into the world your “wild and guilty fantasy” of property in man, and every echo responds with a cry of horror or contempt; every breeze, from whatever point of the compass it may come, brings you a verdict of condemnation. ”

“ Delawarr whom I hear say, that consistency is a prejudice and conduct to be ruled by convenience? Opinions may change with the circumstances on which they were founded, but principles never. Either your whole past life has been a lie, or else your present conduct. The high and warm feelings your youth, matured by the convictions of manhood—all that a whole life has held to be right—cannot, surely, in the experience of a few days, be utterly wrong. ”

“ Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganised condition of society: how ill many arranged forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful forces are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganisation;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which, all other confusion circulates in the world! ”

“ What Mr.Cable calls the "vast, vague afrite of amalgamation," which was once a real power in the land, seems, through the repulsion born of conflict and changed relations, to have lost its potency for either good or evil. ”

“ Perhaps we might be able to find, if we looked round the world, some political union like this, some hideous monster of a state, cursed with one principle of sensation and two principles of volition, self-loathing and self-torturing, made up of parts which are driven by a frantic impulse to inflict mutual pain, yet are doomed to feel whatever they inflict, which are divided by an irreconcilable hatred, yet are blended in an indissoluble identity. ”

“ In those stabler days every one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions about life and race and the tendency of things. ”

“ Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their portion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. ”

“ "For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union." ”

“ When tradition and prestige had disappeared the social edifice suddenly fell.
This progressive disaggregation finally descended to the people, but was not commenced by the people. The people follows examples, but never sets them. ”

“ The union will be denaturalised and, so far as philosophy goes, actually destroyed, if we seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If we isolate the terms mind and body and study the inward implications of each apart, we shall never discover the other. ”

“ XXI. Yet this division does not proceed from ignorance; for the soul admits of a twofold division, one of which partakes of reason, the other is without it. When, therefore, we are ordered to give a law to ourselves, the meaning is, that reason should restrain our rashness. ”

“ Should ye attribute a mistake to a person, it will be a cause of offense and grief to him—how much greater would this be if it is attributed to a number of people! How often it hath occurred that a slight difference hath caused a great dissension and hath been made a reason for division. ”

“ It might be urged against us that reality means barely non-appearance, and that unity is the naked denial of plurality. And in the same way individuality might be taken as the barren absence of discord and of dissipation. Perfection, again, would but deny that we are compelled to go further, or might signify merely the failure of unrest and of pain. ”

“ But how extremely unlikely it is that nations, drawing quite independently of one another these lines of enclosure, should draw them in all or most cases exactly in the same direction, neither narrower nor wider; how almost inevitable, on the contrary, that very often the lines should not coincide—and this, even supposing no moral forces at work to disturb the falling of the lines. ”

“ Take away the language of a people, and you destroy at once that powerful chain [pg 255] of tradition in thought and sentiment which holds all the generations of the same race together, if we may use an unpleasant simile, like the chain of a gang of galley-slaves. These slaves, we are told, very soon fall into the same pace, without being aware that their movements depend altogether on the movements of those who walk before them. ”

“ And finally upon the question of reconstruction we find that perpetual disbarment is not visited upon the people of the mightiest city of the new world, because it has from time to time made mistakes and put bad men to the fore. ”

“ In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"—men free from the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they were born ”

“ This world, too, is certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together, he will not deny me his assent. ”

“ With the treatment of these great themes, sectarian differences begin: differences which seem beyond our power to reconcile. We need not dwell on the differences, we would rather emphasise the mass of agreement. ”

“ If boys and men would reflect more deeply on this great truth, pride, boasting, and the false separation of classes would be less rife. We say false, because there is a separation of classes which is natural and unavoidable. ”

“ Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that the mere will to separate were in this case, or in any case, a sufficient ground for separation, I beg to be informed whose will? The will of any knot of men who, by fair means or foul, by usurpation, terrorism, or fraud, have got the reins of government into their hands? ”