IRRECONCILABLES.

It is easy to think with the crowd; and the thoughts of men, like electricity, choose the easiest way. Yet all the more, when men force themselves to think alone, they are like electricity which, meeting an obstruction, overleaps it with a speed that may be heard ten thousand miles.

The cry has gone up to still those who do not believe as the nation believes. If the thought of such men is ill, then let their thought be obliterated, for we have enough of sickly thought. If the thought of such men is irreconcilable from the eternal desire of egoism to be individual, then let their thought be obliterated, for we have enough of egoisms which are mad with the consciousness of themselves. But if the thought of such men is strong and clear, however strange it may seem to us, let us not dare, for the very fear of truth that is in us, to obliterate it, lest we be one with those who crucified righteousness for the cry of the Pharisees and the rabble.

We believe as other men believe because we are right and they are right; not because they are right and we are too dull to reason. So soon as our conceptions of existence become those of other men, however true in themselves they are, we in our own minds are untrue, and worse than the bravest liars.

Give us irreconcilables that we may justify our own convictions. Give us adversaries that we may know the consciousness of our own strength. Give us rocks to stand against the tide, and oaks against the whirlwind.

It is better to have one brave fool than a hundred cowards that chant wisdom by rote; and a steadfast man is not to be compared with a throng of popular clamorers. Only from struggle may there arise strength, and only from opposition the truth.