[The Promised Land by Mary Antin]@TWC D-Link book
The Promised Land

CHAPTER VI
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Do you not remember, you spotless one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat and rob?
Oh, not with your own hand, of course! It was your remote ancestor who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his hairy hands.

By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective than violence, and less troublesome.

Still later he became convinced that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and subdued the world.

Then, when you came along, stumbling through the wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time bellowing in your ear, "Now be good! It pays!" This is the whole history of your saintliness.

But all people do not take up life at the same point of human development.


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