Could I have swum with the stream and have
said yes or no as yes or no were expected, I might have revelled in
generous hospitality. Nothing can be pleasanter than the houses
here if you will only be as idle as the owners of them. But when
once you show them that you have an object, they become afraid of
you. And industry,--in such houses as I now speak of, is a crime.
You are there to glide through the day luxuriously in the house,--
or to rush through it impetuously on horseback or with a gun if you
be a sportsman. Sometimes, when I have asked questions about the
most material institutions of the country, I have felt that I was
looked upon with absolute loathing. This is disagreeable.
And yet I find it more easy in this country to sympathise with the
rich than with the poor. I do not here describe my own actual
sympathies, but only the easiness with which they might be evoked.
The rich are at any rate pleasant. The poor are very much the
reverse. There is no backbone of mutiny in them against the
oppression to which they are subjected; but only the whining of a
dog that knows itself to be a slave and pleads with his soft paw
for tenderness from his master; or the futile growlings of the
caged tiger who paces up and down before his bars and has long ago
forgotten to attempt to break them. They are a long-suffering race,
who only now and then feel themselves stirred up to contest a point
against their masters on the basis of starvation.
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