Writes a friend:

Keep hammering away. As every stone mason knows, each hammer-hit on the chisel brings him that much closer to splitting the stone. Although nothing may appear physically on the surface, with each hit there is something happening within the stone that the eye cannot see.

When I was five my grandfather -- a contractor and stone mason -- demonstrated this principle to me, and let me do it too. As he explained, in days before there was scientific evidence to support him (scanning tunneling microscopy did not develop until the early 1980's), "With every tap of the hammer on the chisel along the scored line, the atoms inside the stone move to reconfigure themselves in preparation for the split. Nothing appears on the surface, however, until the last tap when the stone falls apart."

So just keep on hammering. The Empire will fall apart.