Aristocracy, democracy, are not vain doctrines for us to dispute about; they are powers; you neither exalt them nor depress them by praise or by blame; before we talk of them, they exist or they do not exist.
Morley reflects on the enduring nature of political ideologies like aristocracy and democracy.
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If they, situated exactly as we are, decline to join, we are not bound single-handed to make up the deficiencies of the rest.
Happy the man who from out the floods has fled the storm and found the haven; happy too is he who has surmounted toil and trouble.—Bacchae, 902-5.
For this line of contention he was called an “unpatriotic trumpet of disaster,” and other names commonly bestowed on all men in all countries who venture to say that what chances for the hour to be a popular war is a blunder.
It is a case so to speak of “limited liability.” We are bound in honour—you cannot put a legal construction upon it—to see in concert with others that these arrangements are maintained.
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