Daily Inspiration Quote by Ethan A. Hitchcock

A soldier flatly noting medieval intolerance isn’t just taking a cheap shot at the past; it’s laying groundwork for a moral baseline. Hitchcock’s phrasing, “a fact all too familiar,” performs a kind of rhetorical conscription: the reader is drafted into agreement before any argument even begins. There’s no flourish, no anecdote, no concession to complexity. That severity is the point. Coming from a career officer, the line carries the cadence of a field report - impersonal, declarative, impatient with debate. It treats intolerance as established terrain, not a contested thesis.

The subtext is less about the Middle Ages than about Hitchcock’s own century and audience. Mid-19th-century America was busy congratulating itself on “progress” while fighting over slavery, immigration, anti-Catholic nativism, and the violent policing of dissent. Calling medieval intolerance “familiar” quietly suggests: if we recognize that cruelty back there, we should recognize its mechanisms here. The vagueness of “Middle, and even later, Ages” also matters. He blurs periods to emphasize continuity - intolerance doesn’t vanish on schedule when the calendar flips to “modern.”

There’s a second, subtler move: by describing intolerance as common knowledge, he implies that ignorance is no excuse. If everyone already knows what intolerance looks like, then contemporary acts of exclusion can’t hide behind innocence or tradition. The sentence functions like a reprimand disguised as a reminder.