But when principles have been proved and objections answered, there are still some last words to say for some who stand apart—­the men who held the breach.  For, they do stand apart, not in error but in constancy; not in doubt of the truth but its incarnation; not average men of the multitude for whom human laws are made, who must have moral certainty of success, who must have the immediate allegiance of the people.  For it is the distinguishing glory of our prophets and our soldiers of the forlorn hope, that the defeats of common men were for them but incentives to further battle; and when they held out against the prejudices of their time, they were not standing in some new conceit, but most often by prophetic insight fighting for a forgotten truth of yesterday, catching in their souls to light them forward, the hidden glory of to-morrow.  They knew to be theirs by anticipation the general allegiance without which lesser men cannot proceed.  They knew they stood for the Truth, against which nothing can prevail, and if they had to endure struggle, suffering and pain, they had the finer knowledge born of these things, a knowledge to which the best of men ever win—­that if it is a good thing to live, it is a good thing also to die.  Not that they despised life or lightly threw it away; for none better than they knew its grandeur, none more than they gloried in its beauty, none were so happily full as they of its music; but they knew, too, the value of this deep truth, with the final loss of which Earth must perish:  the man who is afraid to die is not fit to live.  And the knowledge for them stamped out Earth’s oldest fear, winning for life its highest ecstasy.  Yes, and when one or more of them had to stand in the darkest generation and endure all penalties to the extreme penalty, they knew for all that they had had the best of life and did not count it a terrible thing if called by a little to anticipate death.  They had still the finest appreciation of the finer attributes of comradeship and love; but it is part of the mystery of their happiness and success, that they were ready to go on to the end, not looking for the suffrage of the living nor the monuments of the dead.  Yes, and when finally the re-awakened people by their better instincts, their discipline, patriotism and fervour, will have massed into armies, and marched to freedom, they will know in the greatest hour of triumph that the success of their conquering arms was made possible by those who held the breach.

II

When, happily, we can fall back on the eloquence of the world’s greatest orator, we turn with gratitude to the greatest tribute ever spoken to the memory of those men to whom the world owes most.  Demosthenes, in the finest height of his finest oration, vindicates the men of every age and nation who fight the forlorn hope.  He was arraigned by his rival, AEschines, for having counselled the Athenians to pursue a course