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SELF-RELIANCE

distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites
them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a
hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine
action will explain itself, and will explain your other
genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act
singly, and what you have already done singly will justify
you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm
enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have
done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how
it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you
always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the
foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What
makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the
field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of
a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an
united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a
visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder
into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port,
and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us
because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We
worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and
pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and
homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore
of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young
person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of
conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and
ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner,
let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never
bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at
my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity,
and though I would make it kind, I would make it true.
Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and
squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of
custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot
of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and

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