" Let those of the respectable press
who are without sin, cast the first stone at the unrespectable. Many of
the latter class, who have been branded as traitors and villains, were
single-minded, earnest, valiant men; and, as for even O'Flynn, and those
worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were
too honest--they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like
Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become
"unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"--seeing,
indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore
off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's
clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became
just what they really were--just what hundreds more would become, who
now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to
be unrespectable as it does to be respectable; if the selfishness and
covetousness, bigotry and ferocity, which are in them, and more or less in
every man, had happened to enlist them against existing evils, instead of
for them.
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