f Heaven, discernible behind all these
confused world-wide entanglements, of Landlord interests,
Manufacturing interests, Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other
interests, expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would seem to
every one a flat impossibility, which all wise men might as well at
once abandon. If you do not know eternal Justice from momentary
Expediency, and understand in your heart of hearts how Justice,
radiant, beneficent, as the all-victorious Light-element, is also in
essence, if need be, an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all
manner of vested interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they
were soft wax, and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and
allows nothing else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of
impossibility! But it is only difficult, it is not impossible.
Possible? It is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.

* * * * *

Fair day's-wages for fair day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man: Alas,
in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that
ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named
_Paradise Lost_ and _Milton's Works_, were Ten Pounds paid by
instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows.
Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish; it is an authentic,
altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole
world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Cromwell quitted
his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with
that Lernean Hydra-coil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through
its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quack-heads; and he did
wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have heard of;
and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good many stages, so
that its hissing is ever since pitiful in comparison, and one can walk
abroad in comparative peace from it;--and his wages, as I understand,
were burial under the gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his
head on the gable of Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed
cursing and ridicule from all manner of men. His dust lies under the
Edgware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his memory
is--Nay what matters what his memory is? His memory, at bottom, is or
yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror to all quacks and
cowards and insincer