No Bread purchasable by
them:'--_such_ Ready-Reckoner, methinks, is beginning to be
suspect; nay is ceasing, and has ceased, to be suspect! Such
Ready-Reckoner is a Solecism in Eastcheap; and must, whatever be
the press of business, and will and shall be rectified a little.
Business can go on no longer with _it._ The most Conservative
English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is
driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,'
and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and
very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life as
it is has ceased to be longer possible for them.

Urge not this noble silent People; rouse not the Berserkir-rage
that lies in them! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their
Pyms and Bradshaws? Men very peaceable, but men that can be made
very terrible! Men who, like their 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 range 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 hear