LETTER XLI.
Dear Charles,—You think I must lately have been ingratiating
myself with the lawyers, as formerly with the
doctors. Well, suppose that to be the case; is it a sin?
Your reverence might easily find worse company, both out
there and in here. An intelligent, honorable, gentlemanly
lawyer, (and more especially when a true Christian,) is the
best and most improving companion imaginable. All things
else being equal, I am ready to prefer a lawyer for my representative
to almost any other class of men.
You ask, (rather sneeringly, domine,) when I am to become
a candidate for Congress. I answer: about the time
your reverence adds a cockade and sword to a black gown,
and marches at the head of a pious congregation to shoot
Mexicans for the good of the country.
However, my party is too small for the indulgence of this
lofty notion. I have no special liking for what might await
a candidate of my stamp—groans and hisses, surely; and
in favorable circumstances, tar and feathers. When the
largest liberty party is swelled into immensity by the scum
of foreign jails and poor-houses, a representative will be only
the head of a grand boil, through which head its pus and
feculence will run. In other words, representation will be
a mere scab. This is acknowledged as a very mangy metaphor;
still it expresses a truth: for if true, “like people,
like priest,” it is equally true, “like party, like representative.”
Infidel demagogues and atheistic reformers affect to sneer
at the priest; yet, a more soulless hypocrite exists not, than
a pseudo-patriot and pseudo-philanthropist. And, what self-conceit
can match the insufferable people's-man, (as, par excellence,
he styles himself,) who is like the people's-line, or
people's steamboat or stage, running his opposition against
Bible-truths and customs, for the glory and frolic and profit
of the service! Why, these men, for the station of an hour,
or to please the restless and captious, and to gratify the feelings
of ignorance and spite and prejudice, will at any time,
as far as they can do it, rudely throw down every barrier
the wisdom and experience of ages may have erected against
presumption, insolence, and quackery!
If, Charles, it be true, as some say, that the literature and
habits of a people make the laws, then may we regard law-makers
as indices, pointing to the degree in the moral and mental
barometer and thermometer of the folk. And, although
many representatives are mere gasometers, letting off the
people's steam in the vapors of cant and prejudice, yet, if
the people themselves are in this to blame, it seems a waste
of time to defeat the election of the Hon. Mr. Timpkins, as
lie would only give place to the Hon. Mr. Simpkins. Let
us cure the people, and the days of canting and traitorous
demagogues are past; and the halls and councils of the nation
will be adorned with men of wisdom, gravity, dignity, benevolence,
Christianity.
Freely is it granted that wise and good men differ now,
and perhaps must ever differ, as to the policy of certain restrictions,
placed by the laws on the different fooleries and
quackeries of their day, while they yet entirely agree in
despising and condemning these evils; indeed, some excellent
and intelligent persons do honestly think that all sorts of
humbuggery should have an unimpeded way, an ample scope,
as the best method of staying their progress.
Other intelligent, but certainly not benevolent men, are
indifferent who suffers, provided themselves escape; and
others take a kind of malicious delight in seeing “the fools”
gulled, satisfied that their own skill and caution must ever
secure themselves from trickery. Public men of these kinds
we may love and honor or respect, in different degrees;
but who can respect, in any degree, the public man who deliberately
avows and urges with an abuse of good logic, as
the reason for repealing all laws against acknowledged
quackeries, that science itself is little better than quackery!
Are we in the “nineteenth” century (and the politicians
who run the people's-line use that term as a catch-word) to
be soberly told that there is no science? Shall we be told
that wisdom, and goodness, and learning, after years of toilsome
study and experiment, and deep and patient investigation,
can discover no laws of nature! and that laws of nature,
when discovered, operate no better than chance! or
that in some things—medicine, for instance—there is no nature,
no laws to discover, no rules to apply! that health and
sickness is chance, and may be left to chance! Credat Judæus,
&c.
Men of science may, indeed, fall into errors; they may
have various, and even opposite hypotheses, to account for
the causes of facts; but does that prove that they have no
truth, and that they cannot avail themselves of facts, even
where they fail to assign just causes for them? It is a very
easy matter to collect all the errors in any art or science—
all the difficulties; all the admissions of fallacy; all the
petulant murmurs of scientific men, uttered in moments of
disappointment and chagrin—and then we can, if disposed
to make jackasses stand auribus erectis, aggravate, and distort,
and misinterpret, and sneer, till the shallow and the mischievous,
and the sly chaps of medicated candy, honied pills
and the like, shall all, chuckling, exclaim, “Hurrah! quackery
for ever!” And then we can vote down all noble edifices
of science and overthrow all her bulwarks, and send, with
legislative sanction, humbuggery to peddle its guzzles with
becoming dignity throughout all Alleghania. But all this
malicious and solemn farce cannot alter our immovable and
confident belief, that industry is better than indolence—
knowledge than ignorance—modesty than impudence—truth
than lying, and science than chance!
What moves me, Charles, to this little tirade against some
of our sapient rulers, is a small pamphlet on my table, sent
by a friend; which pamphlet contains some virulent and official
speeches against the regular doctors, at a time when a
bill was introduced in favor of the irregulars.
As far as the Hon. Dux-gregis sticks to mere policy and
expedient, I can respect him, while, on those points, my
views may differ, perchance, from his; but when I find him
spouting forth the vulgar cant against the science of medicine
and its learned professors, I stand amazed! Why,
Charles, he deliberately places quackery and science on a
par! and he tosses about the names of Hippocrates, and
Boerhaave, and Rush, as if they were Lobelia, or Hydropath,
or Smokimdri, or Swetumthro'!!
The gentlemen of the Faculty, it seems, complained of the
speeches as an insult; but they should have recollected that
a body politic must have its pustules, like the body natural,
and that such, of necessity, must occasionally break and run.
Indeed, according to the mode of the speeches, one might
easily show the futility of divinity, or music, or even law
and politics, as a science. As to the latter, who could not
collect all the sayings about the “glorious uncertainty of
law?” and all the petulant expressions of learned lawyers
and statesmen themselves, such as “a fig for the trial by
jury,” and then go on to show that every man shall be his
own lawyer and statesman? Doubtless, before the close of
the “nineteenth,” every man that lives in a republic will,
like Horace's wise man, be both a king and a cobbler, with
“a touch of the snapping-turtle.”
It is said by some that every man has a right to make a
fool of himself, (especially, I suppose, in a free country,)
but then, Charles, there is certainly a choice in the places.
