288 
A CRUSADE IN THE EAST. 
General. —“ Oh, we leave it to our children. "We can’t 
well spare the time to eat it or wear it on our backs, so when 
we die we bequeath it to our sons, who, being rather younger 
in the world, don’t know its value, and spend it. They spend 
it tolerably fast sometimes, Yusef; they live very rapidly on 
it, indeed—railroad fashion, using a good deal of steam to 
help them along: they get over the track with considerable 
velocity, you may depend upon it.” 
Yusef.—“ And then what do they do ?” 
General (with a yawn).- — “ Bust!” 
Yusef whistles with astonishment, but says nothing. 
General (finding Yusef so favorably disposed toward a 
peaceful and contented mode of life).—“ I consider this an 
appropriate occasion, Yusef, to let you know my utter abhor¬ 
rence of the system of flogging which you adopt in your man¬ 
agement of the muleteers. It is extremely repugnant to my 
feelings, and I beg you will not repeat it hereafter.” 
Yusef. —“ Inshalla ! they are nothing but brutes. It does 
’em good, sir. They couldn’t get along without it. Fain 
would I do any thing to oblige your Excellency, but if I quit 
whipping them they would raise a mutiny directly.” 
General. —“ A most absurd argument—fit only for a bar¬ 
barous people. These muleteers are freemen, and not slaves. 
You have no moral right to whip them. If they were slaves 
it might be another question. What do you think would be 
the result if we Americans, a free-born people, were to seize 
up a free-born sailor or soldier and flog him like a slave ?” 
Yusef. —“Think, 0 General? Doubtless I’d think he 
deserved it. Discipline, sir, must be kept up in all the rela¬ 
tions between master and man. If a man won’t do his duty, 
he must be whipped into it; that’s the way I always serve 
these dogs.” 
General. —“ It wouldn’t do for you to undertake such a 
barbarous thing in our country. Thank God ! we are a civ¬ 
ilized people. Public sentiment and the laws of the land 
would soon put down such tyranny. The captain of a whale- 
ship, or of any other ship, who flogs a man and accidentally 
kills him by too much flogging, is tried by the laws of the 
