Sherburn on Cowardice Old and New

 

Sherburn on Cowardice Old and New

Colonel Sherburn – a proud looking man about 55 – and he was a heap and the best dressed man in that town.

Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and pray for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in daytime and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people – where as you’re just as brave and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because their afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they would do.

. . . The average man don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man – like Buck Harkness there – shouts ‘Lynch him! Lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid to be found out for what you are – cowards – and so you raise a yell, and hang yourself onto that half-a-man’s coattail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but from courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

------------From Colonel Sherburn’s slow and scornful speech, Chapter 22, of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.