r old Teutsch Fathers in Agrippa's days, 'have a
soul that despises death;' to whom 'death,' compared with falsehoods
and injustices, is light;--'in whom there is a rage unconquerable by
the immortal gods!' Before this, the English People have taken very
preternatural-looking Spectres by the beard; saying virtually: "And if
thou _wert_ 'preternatural'? Thou with thy 'divine-rights' grown
diabolic-wrongs? Thou,--not even 'natural;' decapitable; totally
extinguishable!"--Yes, just so godlike as this People's patience was,
even so godlike will and must its impatience be. Away, ye scandalous
Practical Solecisms, children actually of the Prince of Darkness; ye
have near broken our hearts; we can and will endure you no longer.
Begone, we say; depart, while the play is good! By the Most High God,
whose sons and born, missionaries true men are, ye shall not continue
here! You and we have become incompatible; can inhabit one house no
longer. Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambitious to try _which_ it
shall be?

O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and struggle to
approve yourselves 'Conservative,' would to Heaven I could persuade
you of this world-old fact, than which Fate is not surer, That Truth
and Justice alone are _capable_ of being 'conserved' and preserved!
The thing which is unjust, which is _not_ according to God's Law, will
you, in a God's Universe, try to conserve that? It is so old, say you?
Yes, and the hotter haste ought _you_, of all others, to be in, to let
it grow no older! If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate
to you that it is not fair,--hasten, for the sake of Conservatism
itself, to probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever
if guilty. How will or can you preserve _it_, the thing that is not
fair? 'Impossibility' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye call
yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies:--ought not honour and
nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth elsewhere,
to find their last refuge with you? Ye unfortunate!

The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree
itself. Old? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has it swung and
creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead wood, the organic
substance and still living fibre of this good tree; many a long summer
has its ugly naked brown defaced the fair green umbrage; every day it
has done mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if
for noth