Past and Present | Page 8

art her mangled victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous, recreant, ought to be and must.
With Nations it is as with individuals: Can they rede the riddle of Destiny? This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new Today? Is there sense enough extant,?discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven million heads to discern the same; valour enough in our?twenty-seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof? It will be seen!--
The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could discover, was, That he had offended the Supreme Powers;--that he had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe, and followed the transient outer Appearances thereof; and so was arrived here. Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and unhappy nations. Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's right truth would have made them free. They have become?enchanted; stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge peril, because they were not wise enough. They have forgotten the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true. They answer the Sphinx's question wrong. Foolish men cannot answer it aright! Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for eternal fact, and go astray more and more.
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death! In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is just. O brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for one thing, to remind thee of such a fact; which all manner of Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks, and indeed more or less all men that God made, have managed at one time to see into; nay which thou thyself, till 'redtape' strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of: That there is justice here below; and even, at bottom, that there is nothing else but justice! Forget that, thou hast?forgotten all. Success will never more attend thee: how can it now? Thou hast the whole Universe against thee. No more?success: mere sham-success, for a day and days; rising ever higher,--towards its Tarpeian Rock. Alas, how, in thy soft-hung Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities,?Parliamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully rollest: but knowest thou whitherward? It is towards the?road's end. Old use-and-wont; established methods, habitudes, once true and wise; man's noblest tendency, his perseverance, and man's ignoblest, his inertia; whatsoever of noble and?ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest always in the strongest men and Nations: all this is as a road to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,--till all this end. Till men's bitter necessities can endure thee no more. Till Nature's patience with thee is done; and there is no road or footing any farther, and the abyss yawns sheer--
Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me; how venerable; grey with a thousand years of honourable age! For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour,?struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they are as we see. For a thousand years, this English Nation has found them useful or supportable; they have served this English Nation's want; been a road to it through the abyss of Time. They are venerable, they are great and strong. And yet it is good to remember always that they are not the venerablest, nor the greatest, nor the strongest! Acts of Parliament are?venerable; but if they correspond not with the writing on the Adamant Tablet, what are they? Properly their one element of venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all times correspond therewith as near as by human possibility they can. They are cherishing destruction in their bosom every hour that they continue otherwise.
Alas, how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the Courts of Westminster; and yet in the general Court of the Universe, and free Soul of Man, have no word to utter!?Honourable Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times like ours. And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all shaking of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having comfortably ended, we shall do well to ask ourselves withal, What says that high and highest Court to the verdict? For it is the Court of Courts, that same; where the universal