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She was the daughter of a nobleman who justly prided himself, in a degenerate age, on the virtue of his house. Nature, as if in recompense for his goodness, had showered all her blessings on his only daughter. Never was daughter more devoted to a widowed sire; never was woman influenced by principles of purer morality.
And yet not much is exacted of them, because they are known to be degenerate. Only half what is required from others is expected from them. They are not asked for heroism or talent, or genius: they are only expected to behave with dignity, they cannot even assume it! They are not asked to add to the lustre of their names, they are only entreated to respect them and they drag them in the mire!
But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it.
They were the ruling conquering people, honourably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom, their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one.
I cannot say that I was satisfied; but my mind was distended by the sense of the magnitude of my possessions. I had large estates in England; and in one of the remote maritime counties of Ireland, I was lord over an immense territory, annexed to the ancient castle of Glenthorn; a noble pile of antiquity! worth ten degenerate castles of modern days.
None of these things had as yet been forthcoming, and the anxious inquirer, mourning the departure of all the romance of the art of witchcraft, was fast sinking into a state of incurable scepticism on the subject of even its utility, in the degenerate hands of modern practitioners.
A society in which property was insecure would speedily degenerate into barbarism; a society in which property was absolutely secure, irrespective of all conceptions of justice in regard to the manner of its acquisition, would degenerate, not to barbarism, but death.
And as in his study of consumption he had arrived at the conclusion that it was not hereditary, but that every child of a consumptive carried within him a degenerate soil in which consumption developed with extraordinary facility at the slightest contagion, he had come to think only of invigorating this soil impoverished by heredity; to give it the strength to resist the parasites, or rather the destructive leaven, which he had suspected to exist in the organism, long before the microbe theory.
By August each will have made a large bush, branching out from one stalk at the base, with from thirty to forty flowers open at a time, each 5 inches across. The same plants if well dressed produce good flowers the second season, but after that the stalks become crowded, and the flowers degenerate. The same treatment suits most of the perennial sunflowers.
Art must forever weep over this bereavement; Humanity must regret that the reforming is thus always ready to degenerate into the destructive principle; but it is impossible to censure very severely the spirit which prompted the brutal, but not ferocious deed. Those statues, associated as they were with the remorseless persecution which had so long desolated the provinces, had ceased to be images.
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