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One writes "Germany." That is how one writes of nations, as though they had single brains and single purposes. But indeed while Mr. Britling lay awake and thought of his son and Lady Frensham and his smashed automobile and Mrs. Harrowdean's trick of abusive letter-writing and of God and evil and a thousand perplexities, a multitude of other brains must also have been busy, lying also in beds or sitting in studies or watching in guard-rooms or chatting belatedly in cafés or smoking-rooms or pacing the bridges of battleships or walking along in city or country, upon this huge possibility the crime of Sarajevo had just opened, and of the state of the world in relation to such possibilities. Few women, one guesses, heeded what was happening, and of the men, the men whose decision to launch that implacable threat turned the destinies of the world to war, there is no reason to believe that a single one of them had anything approaching the imaginative power needed to understand fully what it was they were doing. We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of Mr. Britling's brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen. Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world's destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections. One man decided to say this because if he said that he would contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago; another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity of putting a rival into a perplexity. It would be strange if one could reach out now and recover the states of mind of two such beings as the German Kaiser and his eldest son as Europe stumbled towards her fate through the long days and warm, close nights of that July. Here was the occasion for which so much of their lives had been but the large pretentious preparation, coming right into their hands to use or forgo, here was the opportunity that would put them into the very forefront of history forever; this journalist emperor with the paralysed arm, this common-fibred, sly, lascivious son. It is impossible that they did not dream of glory over all the world, of triumphant processions, of a world-throne that would outshine Caesar's, of a godlike elevation, of acting Divus Caesar while yet alive. And being what they were they must have imagined spectators, and the young man, who was after all a young man of particularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain women onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends, and thought of the clothes he would wear and the gestures he would make. The nickname his English cousins had given this heir to all the glories was the "White Rabbit." He was the backbone of the war party at court. And presently he stole bric-
And Carthage was destroyed because to a Roman to destroy Carthage was a logical competitive necessity. Subsequently, the Romans took the next step in their social adjustment at home. They deified the energy which had destroyed Carthage. The incarnation of physical force became the head of the State; the Emperor when living, the Divus, when dead. And this conception gained expression in the law.
Et idem sentit Divus Thomas, supra, solvens argumenta Augustini, quamvis propter reverentiam ejus quasi problematicè semper procedat. Denique idem sentiunt omnes qui in his operibus veram successionem et temporalem distinctionem agnoscant." Secondly, with respect to animals, Suarez is no less decided: De animalium ratione carentium productione quinto et sexto die facta.
It is fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was really building it to Divus Cæsar.
The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed.
Augustus, Augustus habebitur, will be held or considered praesens divus, a present God adjectis Britannis, the Britons being added imperio, to the Empire gravibusque Persis, with the heavy er, stern Persians. 'What? 'The grave or stern Persians. Beetle pulled up with the 'Thank-God-I-have-done-my-duty' air of Nelson in the cockpit.
In addition to the diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy father Vatican, who assisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at speech. Neither of them had anything else to do. Pavor had.
Still, the Consuls were elected, the Senate met and legislated, Praetors and Legates went forth into the provinces, the Legions watched upon the frontiers, the lesser Magistrates performed their office; but above them was Caesar, directing all things, controlling all things; the Imperator and Universal Tribune, in whose name all was done; the "Praesens Divus," on whom the whole depended; at once the master of the Imperial Commonwealth, and the minister of the Roman People.
Would it not read much more civilized, if the annals of the empire were telling us: Nero, jam divus, leniter dixit: O Seneca, Pundit delectabilis et philosophe laute, quis dubitet te libentissime mihi hodie proferre artocreatem stoicum?
The view south takes in the Caelian Hill, the ancient residence of Tullus Hostilius. The beautiful Temple of Divus Claudius, the Arch of Dolabella, the Macellum Magnum, a market founded by Nero, the Castra Peregrina, the Temple of Isis, the Campus Martialis, are among the most conspicuous objects of interest. This hill is the residence of many distinguished Romans. It is covered with palaces.
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