Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!

A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.