The landlords will in general be men of independent fortune, who, having gifts and ingenuity, choose to devote such gifts to the service of the Society; the first condition of their appointment to a lordship will be that they can work as much better than their labourers at all rural labour as a good knight was wont to be a better workman than his soldiers in war. There is no rule of supremacy that can ever supersede this eternal, natural, and divine one. Higher by the head, broader in the shoulders, and heartier in the will, the lord of lands and lives must for ever be, than those he rules; and must work daily at their head, as Richard at the trenches of Acre. And what am I, myself then, infirm and old, who take, or claim, leadership even of these lords? God forbid that I should claim it; it is thrust and compelled on me—utterly against my will, utterly to my distress, utterly, in many things, to my shame. But I have found no other man in England, none in Europe, ready to receive it,—or even desiring to make himself capable of receiving it. Such as I am, to my own amazement, I stand—so far as I can discern—alone in conviction, in hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of this modern world. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life—and blown about hopelessly by storms of passion—I, a man clothed in soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the wind, have yet this Message to all men again entrusted to me: “Behold, the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.” This message, yet once more; and, more than message, the beginning of the acts that must fulfil it. For, long since, I have said all that needs to be said,—all that it was my proper charge and duty to say. In the one volume of ‘Sesame and Lilies’—nay, in the last forty pages of its central address to Englishwomen—everything is told that I know of vital truth, everything urged that I see to be needful of vital act;—but no creature answers me with any faith or any deed. They read the words, and say they are pretty, and go on in their own ways. And the day has come for me therefore to cease speaking, and begin doing, as best I may; though I know not whether shall prosper, either this or that.