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It will run its course a short one, we trust and be followed or joined by new drugs contributed by conscienceless trade. Intemperance we use the word in its special but most common signification is debasing. Compensation, so far as it goes, is found in the abandonment by those communities among whom it is most rife of certain gross amusements, such as cock-fighting and the prize-ring.
The great mind of this successful usurper was intent on spreading the renown of the English nation; and while he struck mankind with astonishment at his extraordinary fortune, he seemed to ennoble instead of debasing, that people whom he had reduced to subjection.
Many tribes are already as fully subject to all the debasing influences of contact with the whites as they could be if dispersed among the body of citizens; while yet they are without any of the advantages popularly attributed to citizenship.
But the cool intrepidity which I had just witnessed was contagious; in my sublime admiration of it my soul soared far above and beyond the reach of so debasing a feeling as fear, and in my turn I met the cruel sinister gaze of the crafty savage with one as calm as Smellie's own.
There was a reason for this law; it was intended to guard against a debasing superstition; but how would it have been possible to obey it when the people were scattered all over the land of Palestine? It was adapted only to the time when they were dwelling in a camp in the wilderness.
"Oh! beautiful, and rare as beautiful," was that affection; in the parent no earthlier or harder sternness in authority, nor weakness in doting, nor caprice in love; in the child no fear debasing reverence, yet no familiarity diminishing respect.
I don't object to your putting hosts of slumbering incentives in Lisa's mind, but a slumbering incentive is not vulgar and debasing, like a bribe. A plant might be a feeble and common thing, yet it might grow in beauty and strength in a garden like Mistress Mary's.
For this kind of Imbecility erects a fortress for the Evil in the world it could by a glance strike dead. In the one case, as in the other, it is Intelligence which is at fault, the enlightened brain, the calm and discerning eye that can see things for what they are, neither debasing nor exalting them. The clear-sighted eye in front of the enlightened brain there can be no Imbecility then.
Now imagine a week, month, or year, of the intercourse in such a domestic society, the course of talk, the mutual manners, and the progress of mind and character; where there is a sense of drudgery approaching to that of slavery, in the unremitting necessity of labor; where there is none of the interest of imparting knowledge or receiving it, or of reciprocating knowledge that has been imparted and received; where there is not an acre, if we might express it so, of intellectual space around them, clear of the thick, universal fog of ignorance; where, especially, the luminaries of the spiritual heaven, the attributes of the Almighty, the grand phenomenon of redeeming mediation, the solemn realities of a future state and another world, are totally obscured in that shade; where the conscience and the discriminations of duty are dull and indistinct, from the youngest to the oldest; where there is no genuine respect on the one side, nor affection unmixed with vulgar petulance and harshness, expressed perhaps in language of imprecation, on the other; where a mutual coarseness of manners and words has the effect, without their being aware of it as a cause, of debasing their worth in one another's esteem, all round; and where, notwithstanding all, they absolutely must pass a great deal of time together, to converse, to display their dispositions toward one another, and exemplify the poverty of the mere primary relations of life, as divested of the accessories which give them dignity, endearment, and conduciveness to the highest advantage of existence.
Its chief reliance with many has been on prayer and faith, as agencies by which the mighty power of God could be so determined as not only to save the drunkard from the curse of his debasing appetite, but to so move and act upon the liquor-seller as to lead him to abandon his accursed traffic.
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