Note Return to text — REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this country to public life, as was scandalously displayed in the twenty million State House job at Albany (which our arithmetic makes equivalent to twenty thousand lives) and renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive13 (except in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it arrested by the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and a hundred thousand dollar tomb for an individual eminent only by wealth is but a fashionable matter of course to-day. Against this my moral sense revolts. Had I the wealth of Crœsus, or the power of Napoleon, I could not consent to the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a funeral and monument, was the effort to destroy as much as possible, and take from the resources of benevolence that which might gladden a thousand lives. To look back from the enlightened upper world upon such, a monument of base selfishness, would be the hell of conscience; but a simple rose or hawthorn over the couch of the abandoned form would harmonize well with the sentiments of heaven.