The fruit of this wild stock is revenge
regulated, but not extinguished,--revenge transferred from the suffering
party to the communion and sympathy of mankind. This is the revenge by
which we are actuated, and which we should be sorry, if the false, idle,
girlish, novel-like morality of the world should extinguish in the
breast of us who have a great public duty to perform.
This sympathetic revenge, which is condemned by clamorous imbecility, is
so far from being a vice, that it is the greatest of all possible
virtues,--a virtue which the uncorrupted judgment of mankind has in all
ages exalted to the rank of heroism. To give up all the repose and
pleasures of life, to pass sleepless nights and laborious days, and,
what is ten times more irksome to an ingenuous mind, to offer oneself to
calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues and poisoned fangs, in order
to free the world from fraudulent prevaricators, from cruel oppressors,
from robbers and tyrants, has, I say, the test of heroic virtue, and
well deserves such a distinction. The Commons, despairing to attain the
heights of this virtue, never lose sight of it for a moment. For
seventeen years they have, almost without intermission, pursued, by
every sort of inquiry, by legislative and by judicial remedy, the cure
of this Indian malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which
our forefathers brought from the East.
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