ural necessity whatever, of
putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can.
Unable Simulacrum of Ability, _quack_, in a word, must adjust himself
with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;--which
accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses
of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or
spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply,
and it is not there. The "law of gravitation" acts; Nature's laws do
none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst forth into
Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie
as a fatal chaos--!

Much sorry stuff, written some hundred years ago or more, about the
"Divine right of Kings," moulders unread now in the Public Libraries of
this country. Far be it from us to disturb the calm process by which it
is disappearing harmlessly from the earth, in those repositories! At the
same time, not to let the immense rubbish go without leaving us, as it
ought, some soul of it behind--I will say that it did mean something;
something true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in
mind. To assert that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this
or the other plan of clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal
on the head of, and called King,--there straightway came to reside
a divine virtue, so that _he_ became a kind of god, and a Divinity
inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths:
this,--what can we do with this but leave it to rot silently in
the Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and that is what these
Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities,
and relations that men god-created can form among each other, there is
verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the
other of these two! For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical
Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in
this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does
look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men.
There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him
that refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the
Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong
at the heart of every claim that one man makes up