There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the
hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of the
world, fell asleep and awoke to find himself the very monarch whose abject
life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of his moralizing.
Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose existence in
himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the political necessities
of his position, he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and the
luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of
water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such
as would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become
king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told that
within forty years they would be watchful of their publications, lest, by
inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the African Slave-
trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent for compulsory
dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs could awaken the
minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
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