Page:Moyarra- An Australian Legend in Two Cantos, 1891.djvu/99

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MOYARRA
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deemed worthy to represent the wealth, the intelligence, the industry, and the enterprise of the metropolis.

Nay, more; it is contended that if a majority told by heads, demand what is injurious to their country and to themselves, their fatal demand should be conceded.

Nor is this enthronement of disorder, this proscription of common sense, confined to the hoarse unreason of the streets. Right and wrong, in the words of the greatest of Englishmen, are to lose their names.

Then everything includes itself in power;
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf.
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey.
And, last, eat up himself.

Then everything includes itself in power; Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf. So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey. And, last, eat up himself.

We see a party leader, a man of marvellous culture and powers, enslaved to this degrading heresy, abetting what he has denounced as hurtful, and pleading that a leader is wise in his own generation to keep "always a little in advance of each popular movement"—a rule of action which (as a great orator declared) "if the distinguished author of it had been living in Jerusalem on the first Good Friday in the history of Christendom must have made him the first to cry— 'Not this man, but Barabbas.'"

Prophetic voices have been heard from time to time, but have been unheeded.

The betrayal of England by an exotic partisan in 1867 aroused the wrath of Carlyle, who saw the gulf across the path so unscrupulously chosen and so wildly followed.

Another of England's sages, Sir Henry Maine, pointed out in burning words, which will ere long be recognized as