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Those who remain, consist of the most restless and most loquacious, the most eager for office, the self-mutilated club being thus reduced to a nucleus of charlatans and scoundrels. To these spontaneous eliminations through which the club deteriorates, add the constant pressure through which the Committee of Public Safety frightens and degrades it.
It is a love, too, which perhaps leads as many astray, corrupts as many lives, degrades as many natures, as almost any feeling we possess. Its abuses are fearful in their character and wide in their influence. It is a power of mind lovely to behold, and even when degraded it is like a diamond in the dust. So far as the love of natural things is concerned, there is but little danger of abuse.
Whatever demoralizes the home, degrades the community, and crushes out idealism also damns the souls of little children.
A man can continue the work begun by God. He can build up a woman; and as he builds her up he builds up himself. She is also a builder. She builds up a home, or degrades it. If woman is honored in a home, she makes it honorable. At the outset she was man's equal: perhaps she may have thought herself to be superior to him more refined, of better material.
For the carpenter, the smith, the physician, the lawyer, who, when not engaged in his calling, makes it a point not to be known as belonging to it, contemns it and puts it to open shame; and so this endeavor of all men to dress on every possible occasion in a uniform style unsuited to labor, so far from elevating labor, degrades it, and demoralizes the laborer.
Fielding has satirized in Nightingale, Tom Jones's friend, the shallow-brained view of connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt the form. Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he is the only man who has had relations with her.
The drunkenness here alluded to is not of that kind which degrades a man to the level of a brute, but that intoxication which is occasioned by success, and which produces in the heads of the ambitious a sort of cerebral congestion. Ordinary men are not subject to this excitement, and can scarcely form an idea of it.
They despise trade, because it degrades; they have only their crops for sale, and this they trust to their factors; they never scheme to build up chartered companies for gain, by preying upon the public; never seek to overreach a neighbor or a stranger, that they may increase their means by decreasing his; would scorn the libation of generous wine, if they felt the tear of the widow or the orphan mingled with it, and a thousand times would prefer to be cheated than to cheat; despising the vicious, and cultivating only the nobler attributes of the soul.
When large fortunes are suddenly made by gambling, or what is equivalent thereto, then it is that baleful luxury is introduced a style of living beyond the means of those who adopt it, and spreading through all classes. Taste, cultivated and enjoyed at the expense of morals, degrades and debases instead of purifying and elevating character.
Alas for the man who degrades his poverty by worshiping wealth! there is no abyss in hell too deep for him to find its bottom. Mr. Redmain had no profession, and knew nothing of business beyond what was necessary for understanding whether his factor or steward, or whatever he called him, was doing well with his money to that he gave heed.
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