extent of falsity as will serve your purpose; as will not seem too
false to be credible!--I answer, once for all, that the fact is not
so. Nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and
hat-makings; Nature forbids all men to make such. There is not a man
or hat-maker born into the world but feels, or has felt, that he is
degrading himself if he speak of his excellencies and prowesses, and
supremacy in his craft: his inmost heart says to him, "Leave thy
friends to speak of these; if possible, thy enemies to speak of these;
but at all events, thy friends!" He feels that he is already a poor
braggart; fast hastening to be a falsity and speaker of the Untruth.

Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal: her small still voice,
speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under terrible
penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from the truth
without damage to himself; no one million of men; no Twenty-seven
Millions of men. Show me a Nation fallen everywhere into this course,
so that each expects it, permits it to others and himself, I will show
you a Nation travelling with one assent on the broad way. The broad
way, however many Banks of England, Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces it
may have. Not at happy Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of
victory, earned by silent Valour, will this Nation arrive; but at
precipices, devouring gulfs, if it pause not. Nature has appointed
happy fields, victorious laurel-crowns; but only to the brave and
true: _Un_nature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but
vacuities, devouring gulfs. What are Twenty-seven Millions, and their
unanimity? Believe them not: the Worlds and the Ages, God and Nature
and All Men say otherwise.

'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact
all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days,
it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the
Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and the first mention of it
puckers thy sweet countenance into a sneer: but it will be brought to
mind again,--unless indeed the Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and
men find that they _can_ walk on vacancy. Unanimity of the
Twenty-seven Millions will do nothing; walk not thou with them; fly
from them as for thy life. Twenty-seven Millions travelling on such
courses, with gold jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven-high,
are incessantly advancing, let me again remind thee, towards the