34 PROLEGOMENON. 



It were vain, perhaps, to inquire just what ARE the ulti- 

 mate moral expansions derived from the experiences of 

 ingratitude, a savage axe to the root of the natural man, 

 it seems, but hardest of all to bear, and without redress 

 except the brute's joy of vindictiveness and revenge. 



" The world well known will give our hearts to God, 

 Or make us devils, long before we die." 



Ingratitude is the crime of fiends, and stands alone, ab- 

 horred by the meanest worm as well as angel and man. In 

 the thirty-ninth Olympiad, Dracon the Athenian instituted 

 a code of laws so exceedingly rigorous that Herodicus and 

 Damades remarked that "his laws were not those of a man, 

 but a dragon, [dpaxwv,'] and that they were not written in 

 ink, but in blood." Nevertheless, this Dracon was a sensible 

 man; and although his name is proverbially associated 

 with laws considered vindictive and brutal, yet for the 

 NEEDS of the age they were perfect, his laws being, in his 

 own words, " instruments for appeasing the anger of the Gods, 

 moral guilt being the sole rule of punishment/' 



Some of his enactments should be in all codes to this 

 hour, and are certainly divine. He made the punishment 

 of ingratitude death, feeling in his soul that eternal truth, 



" And still on the words of the bard keep a fix'd eye, 

 "Ingratum si dixeris omnia dixti,'" 



knowing surely that the man who was capable of IN- 

 GRATITUDE was capable of all crime, and, ipso facto, worthy 

 of death. 



This is a verdict of the soul, and forever right. The laws 

 of the present moment, in their blind and stupid groping 

 after justice, scarcely knowing right hand from left, take 

 fierce revenge for the stealing of the purse ; but for the 

 stealthy stab of the GOOD NAME, or the treacherous, silent 

 assassination of the trusting, sleeping heart, they have no 

 prison or death. They make honorable restitution to the 

 maltreated dollar, but for faith destroyed in a brother man's 

 character have no atonement, " taking savage cognizance of 



