the enemy is in wait.  Our history so bristles with instances that a particular concrete case need not be cited.  We know that priests will get more patronage if they discourage the national idea; that professors will get more emoluments and honours if they can ban it; that public men will receive places and titles if they betray it; that the professional man will be promised more aggrandisement, the business man more commerce, and the tradesman more traffic of his kind—­if only he put by the flag.  Most treacherous and insidious the temptation will come to the man, young and able, everywhere.  It will say, “You have ability; come into the light—­only put that by; it keeps you obscure.  And what purpose does it serve now?  Be practical; come.”  And you may weaken and yield and enter the light for the general applause, but the old idea will rankle deep down till smothered out, and you will stand in the splendour—­a failure, miserable, hopeless, not apparent, indeed, but for all that, final.  You may stand your ground, refuse the bribe, uphold the flag, and be rated a fool and a failure, but they who rate you so will not understand that you have won a battle greater than all the triumphs of empires; you will keep alive in your soul true light and enduring beauty; you will hear the music eternally in the heart of the high enthusiast and have vision of ultimate victory that has sustained all the world over the efforts of centuries, that uplifts the individual, consolidates the nation, and leads a wandering race from the desert into the Promised Land.

VI

If we are to justify ourselves in our time we must have done with dispensations.  Many honest men are astray on this point and think attitudes justifiable that are at the root of all our failures.  What is the weakness?  It is so simple to explain and so easy to understand that one must wonder how we have been ignoring it quietly and generally so long.  A man, as we have seen, acknowledges his flag in certain places; in other places it is challenged and he pulls it down.  He is dispensed.  He believes in his heart, may even write an anonymous letter to the paper, will salute the flag again elsewhere, but he will not carry his flag through every fight and through every day.  When a particular crisis arises, which involves our public boards, public men, and business men in action, that requires a decision for or against the nation, he will find it in his place in life not wise to be prominent on his own side, and he is silently absent from his meetings—­he gives a subscription but excuses himself from attendance.  He satisfies himself with private professions of faith and whispered encouragement to those who fill the gap—­words that won’t be heard at a distance—­and, worst of all, he thinks, because some stake in life may be jeopardised by bolder action, he is justified.  The answer is, simply he is not justified.  Nor should anyone who is prepared to take the risk himself