"OUR part is not fitly sustained upon the earth unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness includes not only the companions, but the successors of our pilgrimage. "God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or to deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men that in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit, and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have labored for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. "Men cannot benefit those who are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave." --- John Ruskin  

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The 1937 movie Victoria the Great is a moving portrayal of the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In this portrayal of the couple, the most powerful woman in the world manages to retain her husband's love and express her tender submission to him. It is not important if all the details of this dramatic account are accurate. The movie, which is based on Laurence Housman's 1935 play Victoria Regina, works as an inspirational love story and is clearly accurate enough. Few women in history have so publicly expressed devotion to their husbands as Victoria and it is doubtful anyone loved her man more. In one scene, Victoria, played by the outstanding Anna Neagle, is outraged at what appears to be Albert's flirtation with other women at court. The truth is, he has deliberately tried to anger her because she has refused to allow him to help with matters of state. His point is that if she won't allow him to be more than a loafer, he will express his masculinity in other ways. Anton Walbrook is excellent as the German prince, who goes to his chambers in a huff after Victoria displays her anger at him in front of others. Victoria follows. She bangs on his locked door. "Who is it?" Albert asks. "It is the queen," she says proudly. He refuses to let her in. "Who is it?" he calls out when she bangs on the door again. "It is Victoria," she says imperiously. There is no answer. She is…

ALAN writes:

On a night in November 1923, an ex-con pulled an armed robbery at a confectionary in north St. Louis. Or he tried to. But he encountered a little resistance. It made the front page of next day’s newspaper.

A married couple owned the store. The wife and her mother and two boys from the neighborhood were inside the store when the bandit walked in with his revolver and ordered the women to reach. “The boys, terrified, fled from the store,” a news account reported.

Then he began shooting. Provoked to anger, the wife pulled a revolver from beneath the counter and fired three shots. Her husband was in the back of the store. He heard everything, grabbed a revolver from a dresser, and waited quietly for the bandit to enter the room.  Then he opened fire at the ex-con and nailed him with three bullets. The bandit fled. The husband chased him up the street and gave him a merciless beating about the head and ears. (more…)

"MY brethren, there is no teacher, no preacher, no doctor, no apostle, so eloquent, so mighty, so convincing as death. What should we say of a man who had the gift, by a breath, or a word of his mouth, of driving away the mental delusions and follies of all the maniacs and lunatics in the world, or of giving sight to all the blind, or of flooding with knowledge and learning the minds of all the ignorant? Certainly we should say that he had a great gift. But the gift of death is greater. ... [M]any or great, blameable or innocent, fatal or excusable, of whatever kind or of whatever degree, all delusions will go then. The sinner who has so clung to the inventions of his passions or his interest that he has persuaded himself to live a bad life in the midst of the greatest light and the highest privileges, will doubt no more then." -- Henry James Coleridge, The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, 1894  

"THE American middle class has now been liquidated, except for a few remnants that are found here and there and are tolerated because they have no vestige of political power and will soon disappear anyway. A middle class can be based only on property — on the secure possession of real property of which a man can be divested only by his own folly. A middle class cannot be formed of comparatively well-paid proletarians who may have a theoretical equity in a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house they are “buying” on a thirty-five year mortgage, and in a fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile for which they will not have paid before they “trade it in” on a more expensive and defective vehicle. Nor can it be formed of proletarians whose wives have to work — whether as “executives” or as charwomen — to “make ends meet.” With the exception of relicts who live on investments that have not yet been entirely confiscated by taxation, the economic revolution is as complete in the United States as in Soviet Russia: there are only proletarians, some of whom are hired to manage the rest. Managerial employees get more pay and ulcers than janitors and coal miners, but they are equally dependent on their wages and even more dependent on the favor of the employee above them. The nearest approximation to a middle class, both here and in Russia, is the bureaucracy, and it is their vested interest that the Birchers imagine they…

"EVIL and sin in this world do that much of homage to conscience and to virtue, that they never proclaim themselves to be what they are, and always present themselves, as it were, under the colors of their adversaries. Every giant of wickedness here calls himself the advocate of right and justice, every monstrous deed of public and world-wide wrong is done under the name of some watchword of goodness or of truth." --- Henry James Coleridge, The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, 1894; p. 209  

"THE perfection of man consists in suffering all things well, as if they happened to him of his own choice." --- Seneca  

“NO bureaucrat talks of saving the taxpayers, and the reason is that the workers who provide the funds for government are not tax conscious. It takes time and thought to make a study of the cost of government. In America where commodities are sold freelv without ration tickets, the consumers may strike against high prices. In Britain the people have to take what they can get of the necessaries of life. But the Americans have not yet found out why prices are high and the purchasing power of the dollar is shrinking. It is now worth about 48¢. It is a baffling business for the rich and the poor, but there seems to be little hope that the taxpayers will set to work to learn for themselves why they are in distress.

“The modern man we hear so much about has no time to work these things out for himself. The movie, the radio, and television are on the way to destroy thought. Perhaps the real reason why the people of a hundred years ago were able to better themselves is because they were not pestered from morning till night with the distractions of the machine age. When the artisan in Oldham or in Fall River reached home for his dinner, he had a chance to think things over. He was not worried about the payment of the next installment on some gadget that did his thinking for him. He had advantages of meditation the modern man knows little or nothing about. Science was something for the intellectual, and he did not bother much about it. He never dreamed of letting broadcasters have a mortgage on his mind. As for motor cars, buses, or bicycles to give him a lift for a few miles, he would have scorned them. Perhaps he knew that walking was an aid to thinking, as poets and musicians discovered years ago.

“Before the gadget age, the average man used his eyes, and what he saw set his mind to work. His descendant, who travels in a fast-moving vehicle, has no chance to see what he saw. The scenery goes by so fast that he cannot get a proper view of anything of consequence, and this is a very serious matter. For observation is a necessary exercise for the eyes. There were few bespectacled people when men walked. Today nearly every other person over thirty must have sight aids, and the number of people whose ears are decorated with tone amplifiers is increasing steadily. John Hervey, the great racehorse expert, remarked that the gas-pushers are breeding a race that will not know how to walk. (more…)

"LAW is taking on a new aspect. For centuries concerned to maintain every man in his rights, it is mainly now employed to take them away." --- C.H. Douglas, The Brief for the Prosecution, 1945  

ROBERT MANNING writes: It is remarkable that in Ireland, with a total population of only five million, 87,000 (roughly 1/2%) non-European migrants claimed asylum in 2022.  The U.S. is experiencing larger, ever-increasing average monthly illegal southern border crossings over the past two years. The 2.76 million in 2022 approaches 1% (.08) of the current U.S. population. These are mind-boggling numbers. Giant NGO and criminal organizations (governments) are funneling the inhabitants of other continents in through the open wounds of the West.  

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE

— William Ross Wallace

BLESSINGS on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace.
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world. (more…)

IN HIS book The Nature, Dignity and Mission of Woman, Fr. Karl Stehlin writes about the deeper significance of the institution that we celebrate on Mother’s Day:

All motherhood comes from the Mother of all mothers. The Immaculate Mother of God is the model for every mother; her motherhood is the ideal, the basis, the heart, and the goal of all creaturely motherhood. Here in a surprising new way the nature of woman proves once again to be the expression and image of God on earth. The polarity and complementariness of man and woman…, which in the interdependence of their different and often opposite characteristics reflects the all-encompassing Oneness of God, appears here in the special relation of mother and child. This is probably the most intimate relationship that there can ever be between human beings. (more…)

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