Go Set a Watchman

Milady read aloud to me the following from "Go Set a Watchman." I thought I'd pass it along for reasons that the quote should make obvious -- sorry if it's overlong for a comment.

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Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord, she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus's daddy. He was only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little streams down Shiloh's hill....

"Now then, Scout," said her uncle. "Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South's not ready for it - we're finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons. I hope to God it'll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time."

"I don't understand."

"Look at the rest of the country. It's long since gone by the South in its thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property - a man's interest in and duties to that property - has become almost extinct. People's attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due - sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds of strange little things like that have become part and parcel this country's government. America's a brave new Atomic world. And the South's just beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?"

"New class?"

"Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb's new class. The same boys and girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own generation."

Dr. Finch pulled his nose. "Those people are the apples of the Federal Government's eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks' support if they lose their jobs - "

"Uncle Jack, you are a cynical old man."

"Cynical, hell. I'm a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses. Your father's the same - "

"If you tell me that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely I will throw this coffee at you."

"The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer."

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