half 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 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 Valhal