If the laborer and the sailor offend you, by all means let them walk off the stage! I hold to the position which I advanced just now.

A man may be well born, well off, well dressed, well fed--but if he is an uncultivated man, he is (in spite of all those advantages) a man with special capacities for evil in him, on that very account.

Don't mistake me! I am far from saving that the present rage for exclusively muscular accomplishments must lead inevitably downward to the lowest deep of depravity.

Fortunately for society, all special depravity is more or less certainly the result, in the first instance, of special temptation.
The ordinary mass of us, thank God, pass through life without being exposed to other than ordinary temptations.

Thousands of the young gentlemen, devoted to the favorite pursuits of the present time, will get through existence with no worse consequences to themselves than a coarse tone of mind and manners, and a lamentable incapability of feeling any of those higher and gentler influences which sweeten and purify the lives of more cultivated men.