Page:Loeb Classical Library L205N (1958).djvu/517

⁴ I should have sent you a letter before,^[1] were I able to find the right note to strike in writing. For at such a time as this it is the part of a friend either to offer consolation or to make promises. Consolation I set aside, since many people have been telling me with what courage and wisdom you were bearing the injustice of the times, and how profoundly comforted you were by the consciousness of what you have done, and had it in your mind to do.

Well, if this is what you are doing, you are reaping the rich reward of the excellent studies in which I know you have always been occupied, and I urge you again and again to go on doing so.

⁵ At the same time, I have this to say: excellently versed as you are in facts, in precedents, and in the whole of history (and I am no novice myself either, though with studies I have perhaps had less to do than I could wish, and with practical affairs even more than I could wish), I pledge you my word that the bitter injustice you are suffering will not be of long duration, and that for two reasons—the very man who has supreme power is himself daily, I think, moving insensibly towards a position of equipoise and the natural order of things,^[2] and, secondly, our cause itself is such that by this time together with the state—and that cannot lie prostrate for ever—it is necessarily recovering life and vigour, while every day our fears are falsified by