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The desire for power over fellow-beings, for opportunities to control their lives and exploit their labour, is apparently irradicable. Slavery is still amongst us in a hundred forms and under new names. All military conquest involves the ancient practices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of the invader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die.
The fertility of the soil repaid the skill and toil bestowed on it; and every invader, from Agathocles to Scipio AEmilianus, was struck with admiration at the rich pasture-lands carefully irrigated, the abundant harvests, the luxuriant vineyards, the plantations of fig and olive-trees, the thriving villages, the populous towns, and the splendid villas of the wealthy Carthaginians, through which his march lay, as long as he was on Carthaginian ground.
He is not young, but he is not old. His arms and shoulders are mighty. But for the accident of emigration, then, Wilhelm, working to-day in the sun among his Delphiniums and his iris, his climbing roses and flowering shrubs, would be wearing the helmet of the invader; for his vine-covered house he would have substituted a trench; for his garden pick a German rifle.
You say we belong to the same race and invite me to fight against a foreign invader, but you are mistaken again, for there are no differences of races and blood. I only believe in one race, mankind, and for me there are but good and bad nations, Spain so far having been a bad one and the United States performing in these movements toward Cuba a duty of humanity and civilization.
Not one of the loud, disturbed cries with which robins greet an innocent bird-student or a passing sparrow hawk was heard from her; though her kinsfolk sprinkled the orchard, she uttered not a sound. For a moment she seemed dazed; she stood motionless, staring at the invader as if uncertain whether he were alive.
Whatever the exact sequence of his plans in relation to the court revels, the result was that his own banquet was utilised as a proper occasion for blazoning forth to the world with a flourish of trumpets his august intention of dislodging the invader from the ancient capital of the Eastern empire.
But if the invader be gone after plundering the territory, the offending state shall be the enemy of the Argives, Mantineans, Eleans, and Athenians, and war shall be made against it by all these cities: and no one of the cities shall be able to make peace with that state, except all the above cities agree to do so.
No, his time would come in the awful moment when the fate of humanity would hang in the balance, and his place alike of honour and of duty was now in the equatorial room of the observatory at Whernside, watching through every waking hour of his life the movements of the Invader, that he might note the slightest deviation from its course, or the most trifling change in its velocity.
These physical conditions must have favoured the guerrilla warfare waged for four years by the various Celtic tribes against the Roman invader, and it is no doubt partly to them that the old "Belgæ" owed their reputation of courage and fortitude.
But with the coming of age of that national consciousness, the bonds of which have never been snapped, the English entered on their lucky and courageous career of keeping things out. They possess in London the only European capital that has never in the modern period been captured by an invader.
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