They never do. [There's a long pause, his gaze going distant as it drifts somewhere vaguely westward.] Is this all that is left for us, Elrond? To surrender to a doom which has long since lost its use, and submit to an authority not earned by the hardworking, but gifted to the favored?

[It has always troubled him that his people who have endured so much will not likely be ruled by anyone who knows them once they pass into the West.]