I dare
say it was a sort of poisonous intoxication--that I should all at once
declare:
"His lordship tenth Earl of Brinstead and Marmaduke Ruggles are two
men; one has made an acceptable peer and one an acceptable valet, yet
the twain are equal, and the system which has made one inferior
socially to the other is false and bad and cannot endure." For a
moment, I repeat, I saw myself a gentleman in the making--a clear
fairway without bunkers from tee to green--meeting my equals with a
friendly eye; and then the illumining shock, for I unconsciously added
to myself, "Regarding my inferiors with a kindly tolerance." It was
there I caught myself. So much a part of the system was I that,
although I could readily conceive a society in which I had no
superiors, I could not picture one in which I had not inferiors. The
same poison that ran in the veins of their lordships ran also in the
veins of their servants. I was indeed, it appeared, hopelessly
inoculated. Again I read the card. Horace was the son of a shopkeeper,
but I made no doubt that, after he became a popular and successful
writer of Latin verse, he looked down upon his own father. Only could
it have been otherwise, I thought, had he been born in this fermenting
America to no station whatever and left to achieve his rightful one.
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