But, all this while, I was
giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship--to
adopt the tone of "P. P. "--was the election of General Taylor
to the Presidency. It is essential, in order to form a complete
estimate of the advantages of official life, to view the
incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His
position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in
every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can
possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good on either
hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience,
to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests
are within the control of individuals who neither love nor
understand him, and by whom, since one or the other must needs
happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange, too,
for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to
observe the bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of
triumph, and to be conscious that he is himself among its
objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature than this
tendency--which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours--to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the
power of inflicting harm.
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