Having to fight a secret battle was never even considered: threats
direct or vague or subtle, blandishments, cajolery, graciousness,
patronage, flattery, plausible generalities, attacks indirect and
insidious--all coming without pause, secret, silent, tireless. He who is
to be proof against this, and above threat or flattery, must have been
disciplined with the discipline of a life that trains him for every
emergency. You cannot take up such a character like a garment to suit
the occasion: it must be developed in private and public by all those
daily acts that declare a man's attitude, register his convictions, and
form his mind. It gives its own reward at once, even in the day where
nothing is apparently at stake; where men scramble furiously over the
petty things of life; for he who sees these things at their proper value
is unruffled. His composure in all the fury has its own value. But the
mind that held him so, by the very act of dismissing something petty,
gets a clearer conception of the great things of life; by intuition is
at once awake to a hovering and fatal menace to individual or national
existence, unseen of the common eye; and in that hour proves, to the
confusion of the enemy, clear, vigorous and swift. Let us, then, for
this great end note what is the secret of strength. Not alone to be
ready to stand in with a host and march bravely to battle--the
discipline that provides for this is great and valuable and must be
always observed and practised.
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