"Truly let them perish in the fruition of their contemptible desires! Let
them set up a thing called society and worship it; let them lose
themselves in the contemplation of objects whose beauty they can never
appreciate save by counting the cost; let them disgrace the names their
honest fathers bore, by striving to establish their descent from houses
stained with crime and denied with blood; let them disown their fathers
and spit in their mothers' faces,--but let them not call themselves free,
nor give themselves the airs of men. They toss their foolish heads in
scorn of all that a man holds truest and best. We can afford to let them
speak, if they please, even words of contempt and dishonor; we can afford
to let them say that in laboring for our country we are groveling in mud
and defiling our hands with impurity; but we cannot afford to let them
steal our children from us, nor to submit to the pestilent influence of
their corruption in our ranks. Those who would be of the republic must
labor for the public good, instead of insolently asserting that there is
no good in the public on which they have fattened and thriven so well.
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