r imagine
that the great men below pity them because they are not stuffed, and
labelled, and praised by rule in their palaces! And genius is much of
the birds' fashion of thinking. It lives its own life; and is not, as
your connoisseurs are given to fancy, wretched unless you see fit in
your graciousness to deem it worth the glass-case of your criticism, and
the straw-stuffing of your gold. For it knows, as kingfisher and eagle
knew also, that stuffed birds nevermore use their wings, and are
evermore subject to be bought and be sold."

* * *

Against the foreign foes of your country die in your youth if she need
it. But against her internecine enemies live out your life in continual
warfare. When I tell you this, do you dream that I spare you?
Children!--you have yet to learn what life is! Who could think it hard
to die in the glory of strife, drunk with the sound of the combat, and
feeling no pain in the swoon of a triumph? Few men whose blood was hot
and young would ask a greater ending. But to keep your souls in
patience; to strive unceasingly with evil; to live in self-negation, in
ceaseless sacrifices of desire; to give strength to the weak, and sight
to the blind, and light where there is darkness, and hope where there is
bondage; to do all these through many years unrecognised of men, content
only that they are done with such force as lies within you,--this is
harder than to seek the cannons' mouths, this is more bitter than to
rush, with drawn steel, on your tyrants.

Your women cry out against you because you leave them to starve and to
weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the
sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness,
the cry of the sex that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet
there is truth in it--a truth you forget. The truth--that, forsaking the
gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of
glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you fly at public woes
and at national crimes. Can you not see that if every man took heed of
the guilt of his own thoughts and acts, the world would be free and at
peace? It is easier to rise with the knife unsheathed than to keep watch
and ward over your own passions; but do not cheat yourself into
believing that it is nobler, and higher, and harder. What reproach is
cast against all revolutionists?--that the men who have nothing to lose,
the men who are reck