What
his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his fellow-men
require of him is another. The world says, You shall have latitude enough
to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code. As soon as you
break the law openly, and set the machinery of public penalty in motion,
there is an end of you, so far as this world is concerned. You may live
on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and broken you always will be.
It is not a question of right or wrong, of kindness or cruelty, but of
general expediency and inevitableness. To all effect, Mr. Anson was dead
before he breathed his last. He died when he passed within the walls of a
gaol--condemned for theft."
There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face. To this hour, knowing
all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement of
nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not so
much by impulse as by the law of her nature.
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