Perhaps a complete attendance would never
actually be. But who can tell how much influence in keeping members away
may have been exerted by this calm assumption that they would stop away?
How can any man be expected to help to make a full attendance when he
knows that a full attendance is actually forbidden? How can the men who
make up the Chamber do their duty reasonably when the very men who built
the House have not done theirs reasonably? If the trumpet give an
uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle? And what if
the remarks of the trumpet take this form, "I charge you as you love
your King and country to come to this Council. And I know you won't."
CONCEIT AND CARICATURE
If a man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he should
be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really
possess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial; it
remains a mere mistake of fact, like that of a man who thinks he
inherits the royal blood or thinks he has an infallible system for Monte
Carlo. Because the merit is an unreal merit, it does not corrupt or
sophisticate his real merits. He is vain about the virtue he has not
got; but he may be humble about the virtues that he has got.
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