United States or Malta ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But the amateur world-reformers could not make up their minds to choose either alternative. And the result is one of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history. I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the censorship which still existed for me would permit.
War, therefore, is not excluded nay, it is admitted by the world-reformers, and preparations for it are indispensable. Equally so are the burdens of taxation. But if liberty of defense be one of the rights of two or three Powers, by what law is it confined to them and denied to the others? Why should the other communities be constrained to remain open to attack?
So eager were these world-reformers to enjoy themselves that the court did not go into mourning for Queen Marie Caroline of Naples, the last of Marie Theresa's daughters. Her death was not even announced officially lest it should trouble the festivities of the jovial peace-makers! The Paris of the Conference, on the other hand, was democratic, with a strong infusion of plutocracy.
Heretofore the most inveterate optimists in politics were the revolutionaries. But they have since been outdone by the Paris world-reformers, who tempt Providence by calling on it to accomplish by a miracle an object which they have striven hard and successfully to render impossible by the ordinary operation of cause and effect. Thus the Covenant mars the Treaty, and the Treaty the Covenant.
In a word, under the auspices of the amateur world-reformers, the tendency of Bolshevism throve and spread an instructive case of people serving the devil at the bidding of God's best friends.
No wonder straightforward sentiments like these do not appeal to our age of neutral tints and compromise, to our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood-temperature is invariably two degrees below the normal. Ouida's critical and social opinions are infernally out of date quite inconveniently modern, in fact.
But even these postulates were wanting. The eminent parliamentarians failed to rise to the gentle height of average statecraft. They appeared in their new and august character of world-reformers with all the roots still clinging to them of the rank electoral soil from which they sprang.
Word Of The Day