Page:The Pilgrims' March.djvu/110

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THE PILGRIMS MARCH

and instinct worth if interested cry is suffered to pass for public opinion, if sycophancy is suffered to masquerade as citizenship, if tales of petty personal inconveniences are suffered to flaunt themselves as correct reports of national happenings, if an honest appeal to national self-respect is suffered to be stigmatised as coercion and intimidation, if the proud man’s “ipse dixite” are suffered to be elevated to the rank of facts and truths, if the most unwarranted restriction of your commonest right—the right to speak, write, associate and serve—is suffered to assume the sanctity and majesty of law? Will you allow the God in you to be thus insulted? If not, then accept this challenge to your divinity; if not, then call up the spirit in you, if not, then meet hatred with love, misrepresentation with becoming silence, and persecution with noble self-suffering. You are out to teach how wrong ought to be righted, how the very germ of evil is to be killed by goodness, how to make the creed of suffering and sacrifice the established creed of the world, in short, to vindicate the innate dignity and majesty of your soul. One supreme effort is called for. Think and act.