He who has once missed the opportunity of yesterday, when clear perception would have been easier, will not be able to make up his mind today, and will certainly be even less able to do so tomorrow.  Every delay only makes us still more inert and but lulls us more and more into gentle acquiescence to our wretched plight.  Neither could the external stimulations to reflection ever be stronger and more insistent, for surely he whom these present conditions do not arouse has lost all feeling.  You have been called together to make a last, determined resolution and decision—­not by any means to give commands and mandates to others, or to depute others to do the work for you.  No, my purpose is to urge you to do the work yourself.  In this connection that idle passing of resolutions, the will to will, some time or other, are not sufficient, nor is it enough to remain sluggishly satisfied until self-improvement sets in of its own accord.  On the contrary, from you is demanded a determination which is identical with action and with life itself, and which will continue and control, unwavering and unchilled, until it gains its goal.

Or is perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished within you?  Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead?  Long since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation and repeated under every guise, that this is very nearly its condition.  Its spokesmen have believed that this was declared merely in insult, and have regarded themselves as challenged to return the insults, thinking that thus the affair would resume its natural course.  As for the rest, there was not the slightest trace of change or of improvement.  If you have heard this, and if it was capable of rousing your indignation—­well then, through your very actions, give the lie to those who thus think and speak of you.  Once show yourselves to be different before the eyes of all the world, and before the eyes of all the world they will be convicted of their falsehood.  It may be that they have spoken thus harshly of you with the precise intention of forcing this refutation from you, and because they despaired of any other means of arousing you.  How much better, then, would have been their intentions toward you than were the purposes of those who flattered you that you might be kept in sluggish calm and in careless thoughtlessness!