It is always the gentle things of life that conquer us. 'The moving waters'--to quote Keats' beautiful phrase--
The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores'
wear down the towering cliffs along the coast. It is Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the sun over again. The North Wind, with its violence and bluster, only makes the traveller button his coat the tighter. It is the genial warmth of the sun that makes him take it off. It is always by gentleness that the adamantine world is mastered. That is one of life's most lovely secrets. We are not ruled as much as we think by parliaments and commandments and enactments. The proportion of our lives that is governed by such things is very small. But the proportion that is dominated by gentler and more winsome forces is very great. The voices that sway us with a regal authority are soft and tender voices, the voices of those whose genial goodness compels us to love them. The imperial tones to which we capitulate unconditionally are very rarely stern official tones. Who does not remember how, in _The Rosary_, the Hon. Jane Champion asks Garth Dalmain why he does not marry? And Garth tells her of old Margery, his childhood's friend and nurse, now his housekeeper and general mender and tender--old Margery, with her black satin apron, lawn kerchief, and lavender ribbons. 'No doubt, Miss Champion, it will seem absurd to you that I should sit here on the duchess's lawn and confess that I have been held back from proposing marriage to the women I most admired because of what would have been my old nurse's opinion of them.' Yet so it invariably is. Our servants are often our masters. Life's loftiest authorities never derive their sanctions from rank, office, or station. The soul has enthronements and coronations of its own. A little child often leads it. A Carpenter becomes its king. Out of Nazareth comes the Conqueror of the World. The pure and cleansing waters wear down the giant crags at the last.
But with purity and gentleness must go patience. The lapping waters do not reduce the rocky strata at a blow. It is always by means of patience that the finest conquests are won. Who that has read Jack London's _Call of the Wild_ will ever forget the great fight at the end of the book between Buck, the dog hero, and the huge bull-moose? 'Three hundredweight more than half a ton he weighed, the old bull; he had lived a long, strong life, full of fight and struggle, and at the end he faced death at the teeth of a creature whose head did not reach beyond his great knuckled knees!' How was it done? 'There is a patience in the wild,' Jack London says, 'a patience dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself'; and it was by means of this patience that Buck brought down his stately antlered prey. 'Night and day, Buck never left him, never gave him a moment's rest, never permitted him to browse on the leaves of the trees or the shoots of the young birch or willow. Nor did he give the old bull one single opportunity to slake his burning thirst in the slender, trickling streams they crossed.' For four days Buck hung pitilessly at the huge beast's heels, and at the end of the fourth day he pulled the bull-moose down. Buck looked so little, but he wore the monarch out. The waters seem so feeble, but they beat the rocks to powder. It is thus that the foolish things of this world always confound the wise; the weak things conquer the mighty; and the things that are not bring to naught the things that are.