Speaking for myself, both as a man and as a native of our great County of Yorkshire——whose sons are at once speculative and practical, imaginative and concrete——necessity, in the form of an imperative sense of duty, has been laid upon me, to declare, with unmistakable emphasis and straightforward directness, what I hold to be the Truth governing the subject-matter wherewith I have sought to deal. For TRUTH IS THAT WHICH IS, AND ITS CONTRADICTORY IS ERROR. This line of action I have pursued with the greater determination, inasmuch as daily observation of external events——and, if less frequent, still actual reflection thereupon——has strongly convinced me, even against my will, that much of the “forcible feebleness” and most of the “stable instability” of modern British Statesmen and Politicians have their origin and rise in nothing else than this:——lack of clarity of thought and want of knowledge of those, fixed fundamental intellectual, moral, and political principles which ought to be the sure inheritance of the human Race. And pre-eminently of that portion of the Race which is conscious of a lofty imperial mission. “For evil is wrought by want of thought as well as by want of heart.” The ancient Stagyrite ranked Poetry above History, because the former bequeaths to Man universal principles of action, whereas the latter bestows upon Man only a relation of individual facts. But the History of the Gunpowder Treason Plot rises to a higher unity. Because for a man to have read and mastered an impartial record of that deliberate and appalling scheme of “sacrilegious murder,” which happily Destiny first frustrated, and afterwards, through Nemesis, her unerring executioner, signally avenged in the sight of all men, is to have witnessed, with the eye of the historic imagination, a drama that is a poem in action. Nay, more; it is to have had a personal, experimental realization, through the historic feeling, of what is meant, in the realm of Moral actualities, by the infliction of Retribution, the working out of Expiation, the regaining of Justness, the restoration of Equality between outraged Right and outraging Wrong, and the attaining by the tempestuous, passionate human heart of final tranquillity, rest, and peace. For one of the greatest recorded Tragedies in the world is the History of the Gunpowder Treason Plot, regard being had to the intellectual and moral ends effected by that history’s recital. The man who has truly, if indeed but commemoratively, through force of the medium of language merely, taken his part in this great Action, even at a distance of well-nigh three hundred years, will have had his soul cleansed and purified by cleansed and purified pity and terror. Then will he have had that soul soothed and healed. He will have been first abased and then exalted.