If sharks in great cities consume the too credulous emigrant; if usurers, like moths, cut the fabric of life with invisible teeth; if landlords sack their tenements and pinch the tenant--all these results are against the spirit of our law, against public feeling, and they that do such things must slink and burrow.
Beecher condemns the predatory practices of certain individuals in urban settings, highlighting their moral implications.
Share
More from Henry Ward Beecher
And if by an insane blindness you shall contrive to put off the issue, and send this unsettled dispute down to your children, it will go down, gathering volume and strength at every step, to waste and desolate their heritage.
And aroused by that spirit, there shall spring up the yet unaroused hosts of men that have not bowed the knee to Baal--and we will war it to the knife, and knife to the hilt.
Having once given forth this spirit of liberty, now fading out of our Southern States, the North should again come forth and refill the poisoned veins that have been drinking the hemlock of Despotism with the new blood of Liberty!
Northern ideas must become American, or Southern ideas must become American, before there will be peace.