difficulty, abandons a principle he should hold sacred, he must be held
responsible. A battle is an ordeal, and we must be stern with friend and
foe. But there is something more sinister than the weakness of the man:
remember the net.


VI


The concrete case makes clear the principle in question. The man whom we
have seen go down would have been safe if he had to fight no battle but
one he could face with all his true friends, and in the open light of
day. Having to fight a secret battle was never even considered: threats
direct or vague or subtle, blandishments, cajolery, graciousness,
patronage, flattery, plausible generalities, attacks indirect and
insidious--all coming without pause, secret, silent, tireless. He who is
to be proof against this, and above threat or flattery, must have been
disciplined with the discipline of a life that trains him for every
emergency. You cannot take up such a character like a garment to suit
the occasion: it must be developed in private and public by all those
daily acts that declare a man's attitude, register his convictions, and
form his mind. It gives its own reward at once, even in the day where
nothing is apparently at stake; where men scramble furiously over the
petty things of life; for he who sees these things at their proper value
is unruffled. His composure in all the fury has its own value. But the
mind that held him so, by the very act of dismissing something petty,
gets a clearer conception of the great things of life; by intuition is
at once awake to a hovering and fatal menace to individual or national
existence, unseen of the common eye; and in that hour proves, to the
confusion of the enemy, clear, vigorous and swift. Let us, then, for