confess it: we shall all be striped and scourged till we do
learn it; and shall at last either get to know it, or be striped
to death in the process. For it is undeniable! When a Nation is
unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it:
Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye
would not have been unhappy. It is not according to the laws of
Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to
the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and wilful and unwilful
_Mistake_ of Fact; behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out;
Nature's long-suffering with you is exhausted; and ye are here!

Surely there is nothing very inconceivable in this, even to the
Journalist, to the Political Economist, Modern Pamphleteer, or
any two-legged animal without feathers! If a country finds
itself wretched, sure enough that country has been _mis_guided:
it is with the wretched Twenty-seven Millions, fallen wretched,
as with the Unit fallen wretched: they as he have quitted the
course prescribed by Nature and the Supreme Powers, and so are
fallen into scarcity, disaster, infelicity; and pausing to
consider themselves, have to lament and say, Alas, we were not
wise enough. We took transient superficial Semblance for
everlasting central Substance; we have departed far away from
the _Laws_ of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and
inane Chimera is ready to devour us!--'Nature in late centuries,'
says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead; an old
eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking,
but dead as brass,--which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in
a distant, singular, and indeed incredible manner: but now I am
happy to observe, she is everywhere asserting herself to be not
dead and brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-