Battles and Biographies of Missourians, or the Civil War Period of Our State #231065

I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach and pamphleteer and fight, and to the utter most bestir itself, and do, beak and claw, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last — Carlyle.