fact is, you are lost so far as that fact goes! If your thought do not
image truly but do image falsely the fact, you will vainly try to work
upon the fact. The fact will not obey you, the fact will silently resist
you; and ever, with silent invincibility, will go on resisting you,
till you do get to image it truly instead of falsely. No help for you
whatever, except in attaining to a true image of the fact. Needless to
vote a false image true; vote it, revote it by overwhelming majorities,
by jubilant unanimities and universalities; read it thrice or three
hundred times, pass acts of parliament upon it till the Statute-book can
hold no more,--it helps not a whit: the thing is not so, the thing is
otherwise than so; and Adam's whole Posterity, voting daily on it till
the world finish, will not alter it a jot. Can the sublimest sanhedrim,
constitutional parliament, or other Collective Wisdom of the world,
persuade fire not to burn, sulphuric acid to be sweet milk, or the Moon
to become green cheese? The fact is much the reverse:--and even the
Constitutional British Parliament abstains from such arduous attempts
as these latter in the voting line; and leaves the multiplication-table,
the chemical, mechanical and other qualities of material substances
to take their own course; being aware that voting and perorating, and
reporting in Hansard, will not in the least alter any of these. Which is
indisputably wise of the British Parliament.

Unfortunately the British Parliament does not, at present, quite know
that all manner of things and relations of things, spiritual equally
with material, all manner of qualities, entities, existences whatsoever,
in this strange visible and invisible Universe, are equally inflexible
of nature; that, they will, one and all, with precisely the same
obstinacy, continue to obey their own law, not our law; deaf as the
adder to all charm of parliamentary eloquence, and of voting never so
often repeated; silently, but inflexibly and forevermore, declining to
change themselves, even as sulphuric acid declines to become sweet milk,
though you vote so to the end of the world. This, it sometimes seems
to me, is not quite sufficiently laid hold of by the British and other
Parliaments just at present. Which surely is a great misfortune to
said Parliaments! For, it would appear, the grand point, after all
constitutional improvements, and such wagging of wigs in Westminster as
there has been, is precisely w