Lectures and Miscellanies

The answer is plain. Men are ashamed of the respect they pay it. Property cannot be a final fact of history, cannot be a good in itself, cannot be a divine end in humanity, because every man in proportion to his inward culture, in proportion to his genius, is ashamed of the deference he pays it. He feels this deference to be a mere trick of his servile and scullion nature, and inwardly or individually renounces it every time it recurs. The fact is that it is only among the lowest persons intellectually, persons in whom the sensuous imagination predominates, that you find any open profession of respect for it left. Among slaves, in fact among negroes as a class, and among the retainers of great families, in short among all per- sons in whom self-respect has never been developed or fostered, it still exerts an unrebuked dominion. But there it stops. No man of refinement allows it any indulgence.