Читать книгу The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 3 - R. H. Newell - Страница 4

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SHOWING HOW A MINION OF TYRANNY WAS TERRIBLY PUNISHED FOR INTERFERING WITH THE CONSERVATIVE WOMEN OF AMERICA; AND DESCRIBING THE KENTUCKY CHAP'S REMARKABLE SKIRMISH WITH HIS THANKSGIVING DINNER.

Washington, D.C., Jan. 7th, 1863.

As I make it a practice to pay all my honest debts, my boy, and have never flagellated a person of African descent, I could not properly come under the head of "Chivalry" in an American dictionary, though I might possibly come under its feet in the "Union-as-it-Was;" yet I have that in my nature which revolts at the thought of a war against women, and am sufficiently chivalrous to defend any cause whose effects are crinoline. The bell-shaped structure called Woman, my boy, was created expressly to conquer unresisting adversaries; to win engagements without receiving a blow, and to do pretty much as she pleases, by pleasing pretty much as she does. She is a harmless creation of herself, my boy; and to war directly against her because she may chance to influence her male friends to war against us, is about as sensible as it would be to execrate our hatter because a gust of wind blows our new beaver into the mud. If the hatter had not made the hat, the wind could not have blown it off, and if God had not made women, she could not encourage the well-known Southern Confederacy against us; but shall we turn enemy to the hatter, or to the woman, on this account? Not if we know ourselves, my boy, and recognize the high moral spirit of justice observable in the Constitution.

Being thus possessed of a reverence for that sex whose bonnets remind me of cake-baskets, I cannot refrain from frowning indignantly upon that horrible spirit of national tyranny which has inspired Sergeant O'Pake, of the demoralized Mackerel Brigade, to issue the following