Given a world of Knaves
to produce an Honesty from their united action!' It is a
distillation, once for all, not possible. You pass it through
alembic after alembic, it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a
new dress on it, a new colour to it. 'While we ourselves
continue valets, how can any hero come to govern us?' We are
governed, very infallibly, by the 'sham-hero,'--whose name is
Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is
Falsity and Fatuity; to which Nature says, and must say when it
comes to _her_ to speak, eternally No! Nations cease to be
befriended of the Law-Maker, when they walk _not_ according to
the Law. The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes
ever more insoluble.

If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis,
What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present,
almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if
possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays,
egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the
infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt
descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a
_soul_ there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother,
we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us,
exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of
stone for living hearts of flesh. Then shall we discern, not one
thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole endless host
of things that can be done. _Do_ the first of these; do it;
the second will already have become clearer, doabler; the
second, third and three-thousandth will then have begun to be
possible for us. Not any universal Morrison's Pill shall we
then, either as swallowers or as venders, ask after at all; but
a far different sort of remedies: Quacks shall no more have
dominion over us, but true Heroes and Healers!

Will not that be a thing worthy of 'doing;' to deliver ourselves
from quacks, sham-heroes; to deliver the whole world more and
more from such? They are the one bane of the world. Once clear
the world of them, it ceases to be a Devil's-world, in all fibres
of it wretched, accursed; and begins to be a God's-world,
blessed, and working hourly towards blessedness. Thou for one
wilt not again vote for any quack, do honour to any edge-gilt
vacuity in man's shape: cant shall be known to thee by the sound
of it;--thou wilt fly from cant with a