[A Straight Deal by Owen Wister]@TWC D-Link book
A Straight Deal

CHAPTER XII: On the Ragged Edge
15/39

On the contrary, it's the usual, natural, unjust thing that human nature does in times of agony.

It's the Henry Ward Beechers that are rare.

In times of agony the average man and woman see nothing but their agony.

When I look over some of the letters that I received from England in 1915--letters from strangers evoked by a book called The Pentecost of Calamity, wherein I had published my conviction that the cause of England was righteous, the cause of Germany hideous, and our own persistent neutrality unworthy--I'm glad I lost my temper only once, and replied caustically only once.

How dreadful (wrote one of my correspondents) must it be to belong to a nation that was behaving like mine! I retorted (I'm sorry for it now) that I could all the more readily comprehend English feeling about our neutrality, because I had known what we had felt when Gladstone spoke at Newcastle and when England let the Alabama loose upon us in 1862.


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