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Updated: July 20, 2025
The powerful tradition which had bound members of each small community—we should say, of each township—to its familiar gods, with all that belonged to them, was now in process of dissolution; in the larger cities of the world-empire with their mixed populations it had entirely disappeared. Religion was no longer primarily a concern of society; it was a personal matter.
Had Providence permitted a fusion of the two races, it is, possible, from their position, and from the geographical and historical link which they would have afforded to the dominant tribes of Europe, that a world-empire might have been the result, different in many respects from any which has ever arisen. Speculations upon what might have been are idle.
Do not let us, at the behest of either class, be so foolish as to set out in vain pursuit of world-empire; and, above all, do not let us, in freeing ourselves from military class-rule, fall under the domination of financiers and commercial diplomats.
At a moment when the breathing space had been agreed upon before the conflict should be renewed; on a wider field than ever, between Spanish-Austrian world-empire and independence of the nations; between the ancient and only Church and the spirit of religious Equality; between popular Right and royal and sacerdotal Despotism; it would have been desirable that the soldier and the statesman should stand side by side, and that the fortunate Confederacy, gifted with two such champions and placed by its own achievements at the very head of the great party of resistance, should be true to herself.
With the French and English sovereigns united with the Provinces, the cause of the Reformation might triumph, the Spanish world-empire be annihilated, national independence secured. Henry assured the Ambassador that the treaty of Vervins was indispensable, but that he would never desert his old allies.
With the latter victory we shall be freed from the nightmare claim of any one nation's world-empire. But in order to substantiate this result England must also abdicate her claim. She must abdicate her mere crass insistence on commercial supremacy.
To Germans our defence of public law may seem part of the moral hypocrisy of which in their view we are full. What we are doing, they feel, is to strike at Germany, our competitor for 'world-empire', with its dangerous navy, while Germany is engaged in a life and death struggle with France and Russia.
Verdugo would rather have sent thirty thousand men to save the front door of his great province than three hundred. But every available man and few enough of them they were had been sent out of the Netherlands, to defend the world-empire in its outposts of Normandy and Brittany.
But the "beast" of chapter 17 himself, as distinguished from his horns, symbolizes the Holy Roman Empire, which was a revival of the old empire of the Cæsars. This revived "world-empire" was closely allied to the Papacy. When Charlemagne, the Carlovingian king, restored the empire of the West, he was crowned "Emperor of the Romans" by Pope Leo III., A.D. 800.
At Bremen he said: "The world-empire I dream of is a new German Empire which shall enjoy on all hands the most absolute confidence as a quiet, peaceable, honest neighbour not founded by conquest with the sword, but on the mutual confidence of nations aiming at the same end." The Emperor's world-policy was referred to more than once about this time by Chancellor Prince Bülow in the Reichstag.
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