Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/216

 Jones had said: "When He was reviled, He reviled not again," and "He that endureth to the end." It seemed as good a plan as any. I never replied to these or any other of their attacks. Some of the leaders of our movement always insisted that the preachers opposed us because they were influenced, according to the historical precedents, by their economic dependence on the privileged class. But if that is true I am sure the influence was unconscious in most cases, and that they simply did not understand. They were all desperately sincere. That was the chief difficulty with them.

Indeed, I found it better never to reply to any criticisms or attacks whatever. The philosophy of that attitude has been pretty well set forth I think by Emerson, though it has been so long since I have read it that I do not now know in which of his essays or his poems or his lectures he revealed it, though probably it would be found in all three since, shrewd Yankee that he was, he cast every thought he had in three forms. Had he lived in our day he might in addition have dramatized each one of them. But from his advice never to apologize, one may proceed to the virtue of never explaining. It saves an immense amount of time and energy, for since a politician's enemies are legion, and are constantly increasing in number, and can attack him, as it were, in relays, he must have enormous energy if he is to reply in detail to all of them; he will find himself after a while more desperately involved than was the man in Kipling's story, who through the Indian Government kept his enemy toiling night and day to an