As for Mrs. March
herself, the thought of his mutilation made her a little faint; she was
not without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a sort of
oppression. She did not like his drinking so much of March's beer,
either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character
with a hero of the war. But what she really could not reconcile herself
to was the violence of Lindau's sentiments concerning the whole political
and social fabric. She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to say
such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith of
Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all possible
progress in human rights. As a woman she was naturally an aristocrat, but
as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it astounded, it
alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a shuffling evasion.
She had never cared much for the United States Senate, but she doubted if
she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a rich man's club. It
shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were not equal before the
law in a country where justice must be paid for at every step in fees and
costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his own person, and a rich
man might hire someone to go in his.
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