lk of ropes!

It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium, Hypocrisy,
Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to inhabit this
Planet. It is not true that they ever did, or ever will, live except
by the reverse of these. Men will again be taught this. Their acted
History will then again be a Heroism; their written History, what it
once was, an Epic. Nay, forever it is either such, or else it
virtually is--Nothing. Were it written in a thousand volumes, the
Unheroic of such volumes hastens incessantly to be forgotten; the net
content of an Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately
show itself to be, _zero_. What man is interested to remember _it_;
have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to forget
it?--'Revelations,' if not celestial, then infernal, will teach us
that God is; we shall then, if needful, discern without difficulty
that He has always been! The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened
Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have
to survive for a while with the Physiologists, as a memorable
_Nightmare-Dream_. All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines,
and death's-head Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will
one day have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages
are, 'the Period of Ignorance.'

* * * * *

If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-Century have taught poor
struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the
essence of innumerable others: That Europe requires a real
Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist. Huge
French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms with their
corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal Louis-Philippisms:
all this ought to be didactic! All this may have taught us, That False
Aristocracies are insupportable; that No-Aristocracies,
Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible; that true Aristocracies are at
once indispensable and not easily attained.

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching
Class: these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to
harmonise themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a
Pontiff-King:--there did no Society exist without these two vital
elements, there will none exist. It lies in the very nature of man:
you will visit no remotest village in the most republican country of
the world, where virtually or actually you do not