The Wallingford sails early in
the morning, to save the tide; and I hope your lordship will turn out
in season, and not keep us waiting. If you do, I shall be
_ungenteel_ enough to leave you behind."
I left Rupert with a feeling in which disgust and anger were
blended. I wish to be understood, more particularly as I know I am
writing for a stiff-necked generation. I never was guilty of the
weakness of decrying a thing because I did not happen to possess it
myself. I knew my own place in the social scale perfectly; nor was I,
as I have just said, in the least inclined to fancy that one man was
as good as another. I knew very well that this was not true, either in
nature or in the social relations; in political axioms, any more than
in political truths. At the same time, I did not believe nature had
created men unequal, in the order of primogeniture from male to
male. Keeping in view all the facts, I was perfectly disposed to admit
that habits, education, association, and sometimes chance and caprice,
drew distinctions that produced great benefits, as a whole; in some
small degree qualified, perhaps, by cases of individual injustice.
This last exception, however, being applicable to all things human, it
had no influence on my opinions, which were sound and healthful on all
these points; practical, common-sense-like, and in conformity with the
decisions of the world from the time of Moses down to our own, or, I
dare say, of Adam himself, if the truth could be known; and, as I have
said more than once in these rambling memoir's, I was not disposed to
take a false view of my own social position.
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