“Certainly,” I replied; “but what is intellect?  It is breadth of comprehension; and this implies gentleness and love.  The man whose scope of thought takes in the created world, and apprehends man’s place in nature, cannot be cruel to his fellows.  Intellect, if it is selfish, is wisely selfish.  It perceives clearly that such a shocking abomination as our present condition cannot endure.  It knows that a few men cannot safely batten down the hatches over the starving crew and passengers, and then riot in drunken debauchery on the deck.  When the imprisoned wretches in the hold become desperate enough—­and it is simply a question of time—­they will fire the ship or scuttle it, and the fools and their victims will all perish together.  True intellect is broad, fore-sighted, wide-ranging, merciful, just.  Some one said of old that ’the gods showed what they thought of riches by the kind of people they gave them to.’  It is not the poets, the philosophers, the philanthropists, the historians, the sages, the scholars, the really intellectual of any generation who own the great fortunes.  No; but there is a subsection of the brain called cunning; it has nothing to do with elevation of mind, or purity of soul, or knowledge, or breadth of view; it is the lowest, basest part of the intellect.  It is the trait of foxes, monkeys, crows, rats and other vermin.  It delights in holes and subterranean shelters; it will not disdain filth; it is capable of lying, stealing, trickery, knavery.  Let me give you an example: 

“It is recorded that when the great war broke out in this country against slavery, in 1861, there was a rich merchant in this city, named A. T. Stewart.  Hundreds of thousands of men saw in the war only the great questions of the Union and the abolition of human bondage—­the freeing of four millions of human beings, and the preservation of the honor of the flag; and they rushed forward eager for the fray.  They were ready to die that the Nation and Liberty might live.  But while their souls were thus inflamed with great and splendid emotions, and they forgot home, family, wealth, life, everything, Stewart, the rich merchant, saw simply the fact that the war would cut off communication between the North and the cotton-producing States, and that this would result in a rise in the price of cotton goods; and so, amid the wild agitations of patriotism, the beating of drums and the blaring of trumpets, he sent out his agents and bought up all the cotton goods he could lay his hands on.  He made a million dollars, it is said, by this little piece of cunning.  But if all men had thought and acted as Stewart did, we should have had no Union, no country, and there would be left to-day neither honor nor manhood in all the world.  The nation was saved by those poor fellows who did not consider the price of cotton goods in the hour of America’s crucial agony.  Their dust now billows the earth of a hundred battlefields; but their memory will be kept sweet in the hearts of men forever!  On the other hand, the fortune of the great merchant, as it did no good during his life, so, after his death, it descended upon an alien to his blood; while even his wretched carcass was denied, by the irony of fate, rest under his splendid mausoleum, and may have found its final sepulchre in the stomachs of dogs!