Past and Present | Page 9

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
soul of Fact and very Truth sits President;--and thitherward, more and
more
swiftly, with a really terrible increase of swiftness, all causes do
in these days crowd for revisal,--for confirmation, for
modification,
for reversal with costs. Dost thou know that Court; hast thou had any
Law-practice there? What, didst thou never enter; never file any
petition of redress, reclaimer, disclaimer or demurrer, written as in thy
heart's blood, for thy own behoof or another's; and silently await the
issue? Thou knowest not such a Court? Hast merely heard of it by faint
tradition as a thing that was or had been? Of thee, I think, we shall get
little benefit.
For the gowns of learned-sergeants are good: parchment records, fixed
forms, and poor terrestrial justice, with or without
horse-hair, what
sane man will not reverence these? And yet, behold, the man is not sane
but insane, who considers these alone as venerable. Oceans of

horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence,
were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the
indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just. The grand
question still remains, Was the judgment just? If unjust, it will not and
cannot get harbour for itself, or continue to have footing in this
Universe, which was made by other than One Unjust. Enforce it by
never such statuting, three readings, royal assents; blow it to the four
winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in the rear
of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not stand, it cannot
stand. From all souls of men, from all ends of Nature, from the Throne
of God above, there are voices bidding it: Away, away! Does it take no
warning; does it stand, strong in its three readings, in its gibbets and
artillery-parks? The more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe. It will
continue
standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing evil
all the while; but it has One enemy who is Almighty:
dissolution,
explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature
incessantly advance
towards it; and the deeper its rooting, more obstinate its continuing, the
deeper also and huger will its ruin and overturn be.
In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad

foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and
judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that
there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It
is what the wise, in all times, were wise because they denied, and knew
forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One
strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing. My friend,
if thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in
support of an unjust thing; and infinite bonfires visibly
waiting ahead
of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on behalf of it,--I would
advise thee to call halt, to fling down thy baton, and say, "In God's
name, No!" Thy 'success?' Poor devil, what will thy success amount to?
If the thing is unjust, thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires
blazed
from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote

leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight, to all
mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing. Success? In few years,
thou wilt be dead and dark,--all cold, eyeless, deaf; no blaze of bonfires,

ding-dong of bells or leading-articles visible or audible to thee again at
all forever: What kind of success is that!--
It is true all goes by approximation in this world; with any not
insupportable approximation we must be patient. There is a noble
Conservatism as well as an ignoble. Would to Heaven, for the sake of
Conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the ignoble, by some
kind severe hand, were ruthlessly lopped away, forbidden ever more to
skew itself! For it is the right and noble alone that will have victory in
this struggle; the rest is wholly an obstruction, a postponement and
fearful imperilment of the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right
and nobleness, and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We
already know whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will
have none! The Heaviest will reach the centre. The Heaviest, sinking
through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its deflexions, its
obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its reboundings; whereupon
some blockhead shall be heard jubilating, "See, your Heaviest