Note 3 — Chapter XXVIII

In my capacity of Bushwhacker, I make it a matter of business to laugh whenever I feel like it. I felt like it when, on reading the above, this parallelism occurred to me: the hero of the “Miserables”—Jean Valjean—is a thief. Now, holds our author, whenever a man is so unfortunate as to be a thief, no blame should be attached to him,—and he puts it about thus: “A thief is not a thief. Nor a crime. He is a product. A fact. A titanic fact. A thief is a man who hears the cry of a child. It is his child. It is a cry for bread. Society gives him a stone. Effacement of his rectitude. He appropriates society’s wallet. And serves society right; for ’tis society has made him a thief.” Leaving to some coming man the task and the credit of removing from society all stain, by discovering who or what made society a thief-maker, ’tis this that moved my Bushwhackerish soul to smile: this Jean Valjean, whom society is so wicked in producing, turns out to be a better man than any other man ever was, is, or shall be. So we, under our very sinful system, would seem to have prepared for the elective franchise a whole people lately buried in heathenism, without, as it were, half trying. Nor does this claim rest merely upon that braggartism so peculiarly Southern. The very best people on the other side—nay, the people who, by their own admission, embrace all the culture and virtue of the country—have been the first to give us this meed of praise,—yet it is notorious that very few white men are yet, with all their Bacons, and Sydneys, and Hampdens, and Jeffersons to enlighten them, qualified for that august function. Nay, even in France herself, though she is, as Victor Hugo says,—and he should know,—the mother and the father, and the uncle and the aunt, and the brother and the sister of civilization, I believe there are Frenchmen not yet fitted to wield the ballot,—among whom, I doubt not, some profane persons would make so bold as to class the illustrious rhapsodist himself.