it to all the Eternities, the
Gods and Silences. It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are
already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the
prime-matter of all nobleness in man. Honour to you in your kind. It
is to you I call: ye know at least this, That the mandate of God to
His creature man is: Work! The future Epic of the World rests not with
those that are near dead, but with those that are alive, and those
that are coming into life.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion,
destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not
march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand
principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall
reduce them to order, begin reducing them. To order, to just
subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls
are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a
bewildered bewildering mob; but as a firm regimented mass, with real
captains over them, will these men march any more. All human
interests, combined human endeavours, and social growths in this
world, have, at a certain stage of their development, required
organising: and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now
require it.

God knows, the task will be hard: but no noble task was ever easy.
This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your sons and
grandsons: but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were
lives given to men? Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound
scalps, the noble of you shall cease! Nay the very scalps, as I say,
will not long be left if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly
to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws, and become noble European
Nineteenth-Century Men. Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs
and flunky 'respectabilities,' is not the alone God; that of himself
he is but a Devil, and even a Brute-god.

Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that too
was difficult. The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as
the thistle by the wayside,--have ye not conquered it; made it into
beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted
air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains
asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the
Forest-giants, Marsh-joetuns bear sheaves of golden-grain; AEgir the
Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and
on Fireh