Three Timely Excerpts

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States.  I won't tell any American readers how to vote, but here are three excerpts from A Christmas Carol that I think are important to keep in mind — especially because the Holiday Shopping Season now seems to be starting at the beginning of November, not the end.

Scrooge's nephew Fred, from his argument with Scrooge in Stave One:

   “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Scrooge and Marley, discussing what makes a good businessman, also in Stave One:

   “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
   “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

And the Ghost of Christmas Present, correcting Scrooge on an erroneous assumption, in Stave Three:

   “Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”
   “I!” cried the Spirit.
   “You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge. “Wouldn’t you?”
   “I!” cried the Spirit.
   “You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”
   “I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.
   “Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.
   “There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”