hat terrible grief
laid you prostrate, you had faith in yourself, and you conquered. The
conditions to-day are the same; do you but preserve your faith in
yourself, and your star will be constant." But what reply shall we
make if our past can only whisper: "Your success has been solely due to
injustice and falsehood, wherefore it behoves you once more to deceive
and to lie"? No man cares to let his eyes rest on his acts of
disloyalty, weakness, or treachery; and all the events of bygone days
which we cannot contemplate calmly and peacefully, with satisfaction
and confidence, trouble and restrict the horizon which the days that
are not yet are forming far away. It is only a prolonged survey of the
past that can give to the eye the strength it needs in order to sound
the future.

18

No, it was not the inherent justice of things that punished Napoleon
for his three great acts of injustice, or that will punish us for our
own in a less startling, but not less painful, fashion. Nor was it an
unyielding, incorruptible, irresistible justice, "attaining the very
vault of heaven." We are punished because our entire moral being, our
mind no less than our character, is incapable of living and acting
except in justice. Leaving that, we leave our natural element; we are
carried, as it were, into a planet of which we know nothing, where the
ground slips from under our feet, and all things disconcert us; for
while the humblest intellect feels itself at home in justice, and can
readily foretell the consequences of every just act, the most profound
and penetrating mind loses its way hopelessly in the injustice itself
has created, and can form no conception of what results shall ensue.
The man of genius who forsakes the equity that the humble peasant has
at heart will find all paths strange to him; and these will be stranger
still should he overstep the limit his own sense of justice imposes:
for the justice that soars aloft, keeping pace with the intellect,
creates new boundaries around all it throws open, while at the same
time strengthening and rendering more insurmountable still the ancient
barriers of instinct. The moment we cross the primitive frontier of
equity all things seem to fail us; one falsehood gives birth to a
hundred, and treachery returns to us through a thousand channels. If
justice be in us we may march along boldly, for there are certain
things to which the basest cannot be false; but if injustice posses