It remains to me to deliver to you a last message of hope and confidence.
There is no royal road to freedom, and dark and difficult will be the path
leading to it. But dauntless is your courage, and firm your resolution;
and though there will be reverses, sometimes severe reverses, they will
only have the effect of speeding your emancipation from the bondage of a
Foreign Government. Do not make the mistake of confusing achievements with
success. Achievement as in appearances are often deceptive. I contend
that, though we cannot point to a great deal as solid achievement of the
movement, the success of it is assured. That success is proclaimed by the
bureaucracy in the repeated attempts which were made, and are still being
made, to crush the growth of the movement, and to arrest its progress, in
the refusal to repeal some of the most obnoxious of the repressive
legislation, in the frequent use that has been made of the arbitrary or
discretionary authority that is vested in the executive Government and in
sending to prison our beloved leader, who offered himself as a sacrifice
to the wrath of the Bureaucracy. But though the ultimate success of the
movement is assured, I warn you that the issue depends wholly on you and
how you conduct yourselves in meeting the forces that are arrayed against
you. Christianity rose triumphant when Jesus of Nazareth offered himself
as a sacrifice to the excessive worship of law and order by the Scribes
and the Pharisees. The forces that are arrayed against you are the forces
not only of the bureaucracy but of the modern Scribes and Pharisees whose
interest it is to maintain the Bureaucracy in all its pristine glory. Be
it yours to offer yourself as sacrifice in the interest of truth and
justice, so that your children and your children's children may have the
fruit of your sufferings. Be it yours to wage a spiritual warfare so that
the victory, when it comes does not debase you, nor tempt you to retain
the power of Government in your own hands. But if yours is to be a
spiritual warfare, your weapons must be those of the spiritual soldier.
Anger is not for you, hatred is not for you, nor for you is pettiness,
meanness or falsehood.
For you is the hope of dawn and the confidence of the morning, and for you
is the song that was sung by Titan, chained and imprisoned, but the
champion of man in the Greek fable:
To Suffer woes with Hope, things infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power which seems Omnipotent:
To love, and bear, to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck, the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, Great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.