William Q. Judge on Patriotism and a Nation’s Death: ‘Patriots, in vain…’

“But you know, as any man who has read history, that patriots may burst their hearts in vain if circumstances are against them. Sometimes it has happened that no human power, not even the force and fury of the loftiest patriotism, has been able to bend an iron destiny aside from its fixed course, and nations have gone out like torches dropped into water, in the engulfing blackness of ruin. Thus, we who have the sense of our country’s fall, though not the power to lift her up at once, cannot do as we would…” (William Quan Judge, The Truth about the East and West, April 1895, pg. 126)