Had he been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of its existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish aspirations of his earlier years would have grown and strengthened by exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been enduringly written, and to some purpose. Will it be said that the Pilgrim fathers did not hew, out of the New England ice and granite, the idea which gathered them together out of their scattered and obscure English villages, and drove them in their frail ships over the Atlantic in midwinter, to cut their way against all opposing forces? Were they not common men, subject to the operation of common law? Will it be said that Circumstances aided them? When death, disease, hunger, and cold had done their worst, not one of those remaining was willing by an _easy lie_ to return to material comfort and the possibility of long days. Had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and undaunted conception of their own powers that these had, our social movements would not be such pitiful abortions,--core-rotten even before the outward flecks appear. "Give a labor leader a political job, and the system becomes all right," laugh our enemies; and they point mockingly to Terence Powderly and his like; and they quote John Burns, who as soon as _he_ went into Parliament declared: "The time of the agitator is past; the time of the legislator has come." "Let an Anarchist marry an heiress, and the country is safe," they sneer:--and they have the right to sneer. But would they have that right, could they have it, if our lives were not in the first instance dominated by more insistent desires than those we would fain have others think we hold most dear? It is the old story: "Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the gatepost; but aim at the ground, and you will hit the ground." It is not to be supposed that any one will attain to the full realization of what he purposes, even when those purposes do not involve united action with others; he _will_ fall short; he will in some measure be overcome by contending or inert opposition. But something he will attain, if he continues to aim high.