ture.

Dejection, however, is perhaps not the most proper word for the humour
of reserved and grave suspense, natural in those rare spirits who have
recognised how narrow is the way of truth and how few there be that
enter therein, and what prolonged concurrence of favouring hazards with
gigantic endeavour is needed for each smallest step in the halting
advancement of the race. With Turgot this was not the result of mere
sentimental brooding. It had a deliberate and reasoned foundation in
historical study. He was patient and not hastily sanguine as to the
speedy coming of the millennial future, exactly because history had
taught him to measure the laggard paces of the past. The secret of the
intense hopefulness of that time lay in the mournfully erroneous
conviction that the one condition of progress is plenteous increase of
light. Turgot saw very early that this is not so. '_It is not error_,'
he wrote, in a saying that every champion of a new idea should have
ever in letters of flame before his eyes, '_which opposes the progress
of truth: it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything
that favours inaction_.'[31]

[Footnote 31: _OEuv._ ii. 672.]

The others left these potent elements of obstruction out of calculation
and account. With Turgot they were the main facts to be considered, and
the main forces to be counteracted. It is the mark of the highest kind
of union between sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, and a
warm and steadfast glow of social feeling, when a man has learnt how
little the effort of the individual can do either to hasten or direct
the current of human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest
pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe honour to that social
endeavour which is stimulated and sustained by an enthusiastic
confidence in speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more to
those, who knowing how remote and precarious and long beyond their own
days is the hour of fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than
bare hope, and in this strive and endeavour and still endeavour. Here
lies the true strength, and it was the possession of this strength and
the constant call and strain upon it, which gave Turgot in mien and
speech a gravity that revolted the frivolous or indifferent, and seemed
cold and timorous to the enthusiastic and urgent. Turgot had discovered
that there was a law in the history of men, and he knew how this law
limited and condition