Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it. - Rose Wilder Lane

I am ‘law‐abiding’ purely for expediency, for self‐defense, in the main against my conscientious principles, so at bottom I am ashamed of not being a conscientious objector practicing Gandhi’s or Thoreau’s civil disobedience. I did refuse to be rationed; I do absolutely refuse to be Social‐Secured; but I should refuse to pay taxes and be in jail, only what would become of my little Maltese puppies? and my own little area of freedom? and my books and my friends and correspondents? I shall be reluctantly a martyr, only when backed into the last corner of the last resort. No heroine, alas.”

More and more southerners were seeing this fact and trying to get rid of their slaves; there were all kinds of plans for doing this. So many simply freed their slaves that most, if not all, southern legislatures passed Acts forbidding this—Acts intended to compel slave-owners to continue to bear their responsibility for their slave-property, and to prevent an increase of the numbers of untrained, uncontrolled, unfed and unsheltered person at large in those states. To evade these laws slave-owners moved temporarily into ‘free’ territory, freed their salves there, and returned. So laws were passed forbidding this. And laws forbidding such freed slaves to return to the slave States, on penalty arrest, punishment and sale.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.