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There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.

For there comes a time—it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay—but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.