ihilated 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 evermore
to show 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 ascends!"--but at all moments it is
moving centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking;
and, by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of
the World, it has to arrive there.

Await the issue. In all battles, if you await the issue, each fighter
has prospered according to his right. His right and his might, at the
close of the account, were one and the same. He has fought with all
his might, and in exact proportion to all his right he has prevailed.
His very death is no victory over him. He dies indeed; but his work
lives, very truly lives. A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold,
cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England:
but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part
of it; commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla
and Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of brother
and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of slave and
master. If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's chief
blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was not the chief curse.
Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave men rose there, and said,
"Behold, ye must not tread us down like s