Repudiatrix

The Boston Transcript says: […] Here is this youthful member of the common family, but fifteen years of age, for she came in in 1846, a shameless imitator of that hoary repudiatrix, the rebel State of Mississippi!

And is it not doubly singular—singularity upon singularity, so to speak—that we should have waged it?—that we, that for some seven centuries have been so far in the van of the progress of humanity, should now be as far in the rear, that the Mother of Freedom, with her Magna Charta, her Habeas Corpus Act, her Bill of Bights, and her well-nigh faultless Reformation, the first originatrix of the representative system of government, the first denunciatrix and repudiatrix of slavery, the first propounderess of the sublime principle of Free Trade—should now, for nearly three years, have been waging war against the world’s last, and perhaps greatest, discovery—the principle on which all Christendom, except ourselves and Russia, is fully agreed—that every civilised people, every people not wholly barbarous, every Christian Aryan people, should enjoy the incalculable blessing of self-government, which alone is perfect liberty?

But in the year 996 of the Christian reckoning it was still a tiny embryo, blind and weak, which did not imagine the seriousness and toughness of its widowed mother, the repudiatrix herself, whose new presence allied itself easily with the exalted mood that had taken hold of all the partners. […] Instead, he meant to take her body back to Paris, to prove incontestably to the stubborn repudiatrix and her brother, Master Levitas, that he stood before them now as a fit and proper business partner, the husband of a single wife, and that consequently the severed partnership could now be renewed, although in the midst of wrath and pain, and indeed it could be confirmed forever by the testimony of a grave and a monument set up in the very courtyard of their home.