Annalist

“ With the single exception of that part of the incident which concerns the conspiracies and pretensions of the Yorkist faction, which again derives its interest from the tragedy of the preceding reign, the pages of the annalist, where there are any, are so dull that we scarcely complain of their jejuneness. ”

“ Notwithstanding all the source-sifting of modern times, pursued most zealously by the Germans, we are obliged to admit that it is rarely possible with any fair degree of certainty to discover the view of an annalist on a given subject excepting in the few cases in which the citation is by name. ”

“ The ancient kingdoms of the south, although rich and populous, inhabited by Dravidian nations not inferior in culture to their Aryan rivals in the north, were ordinarily so secluded from the rest of the civilized world, including Northern India, that their affairs remained hidden from the eyes of other nations, and, native annalists being lacking, their history, previous to the year 1000 of the Christian era, has almost wholly perished. ”

“ There is no period of ancient Irish history in which the native annalists do not record almost an annual recurrence of internecine wars in all the provinces--wars equally inveterate and sanguinary, whether the country was infested by foreign foes, or not (vide the Four Masters passim) --while, on the other hand, we know that the population of a country never multiplies excessively except in long intervals of peace. ”

“ The stranger (hostis) from a city which had no treaty relations with Rome, or no relations which guaranteed a mutual interchange of citizenship, must, if he wandered to this new home, also make application to a patron and become his client. It is less certain what was the fate of the inhabitants of a conquered city who were violently deported to Rome. The annalists, indeed, represent such men as being received into the citizen body, and as becoming members of the tribe and the curia ”

“ To do all the Scandinavian chroniclers justice, in cases which come directly under their notice, they acknowledge defeat as frankly as they claim victory proudly. Equal praise may be given to the Irish annalists in recording the same events, whether at first or second-hand. In relation to the campaigns and sway of Turgesius, the difficulty we experience in separating what is true from what is exaggerated or false, is not created for us by the annalists, but by the bards and story-tellers, some of whose inventions, adopted by Cambrensis, have been too readily received by subsequent writers. ”

“ From the previous silence of the annalists respecting this people, we may perhaps infer that both they and the Suabians remained independent until the fall of the Ostrogothic Empire in Italy. The Gothic dominions were bounded on the north by Rhætia and Noricum; and between these countries and the Thuringians, who lived still further to the north, was the country of the Bavarians and Suabians. Thuringia had long been possessed by the Franks, Rhætia was ceded by Vitisges, king of Italy, and Venetia was conquered by Theudebert [the Austrasian Frank King] . ”

“ He was a ruthless conqueror, who, having ravaged all Central Asia from the Black Sea to the Chinese frontier, turned his attention towards India. He crossed the Indus at Attock, went to Moultan, and extended his march to Delhi, wading through Hindoo blood, which he shed without resistance and almost without cause. The native annalists record how he put a hundred thousand beings to death in the great city; how he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor or Great Mogul of India ”

“ There went with this strange way of rewriting history a flood of wild hypotheses presented as fact. Thus Parliaments (till lately admired) were imagined—and therefore stated—to be Teutonic, non-Roman, therefore non-Catholic in origin. The gradual decline of slavery was attributed to the same miraculous powers in the northern pagans; and in general whatever thing was good in itself or was consonant with modern ideas, was referred back to this original source of good in the business of Europe: the German tribes. ”

“ For forty years Germany has added to her own difficulties and to those of the European situation for the purpose of including Alsace and Lorraine in its Federation, but even there, obeying the tendency which is world-wide, an attempt has been made to create a constitutional and autonomous government. The history of the British Empire for fifty years has been a process of undoing the work of conquest. Colonies are now neither colonies nor possessions ”

“ Anna-Felicitas made a sound of assent.
"That answer of yours about practically," continued Anna-Rose, swallowing her bit of toffee by accident and for one moment afraid it would stick somewhere and make her die, "causes first surprise, then reflection, and then suspicion."
"But," said Anna-Felicitas after a pause during which she had disentangled her jaws, "it's going to be difficult to say one is German when America seems to be so very neutral and doesn't like Germans. Besides, it's only in the eye of the law that we are. In God's eye we're not, and that's the principal eye after all." ”

“ Here [8] seven hundred of this hapless tribe perished by fire or the sword. The death of Philip, in August, 1676, ended the war. Many of the Indians fled to the west, and a large number died in slavery in the West Indies. The power of the Indians of southern New England was broken forever.
Captain Benjamin Church, a prominent actor in this war, was the most celebrated Indian fighter of his day. One of his most remarkable feats was the capture of Annawan, Philip’s chief captain. Annawan often said that he would never be taken by the English. ”

“ It is this fact, and not some enormous superiority on the part of the English race, that makes our Empire in India possible. If there could arise in India a nationality movement similar to that which we witnessed in Italy, the English power could not even make the resistance that was made in Italy by Austria, but must succumb at once. For what means can England have, which is not a military state, of resisting the rebellion of two hundred and fifty millions of subjects? ”

“ Gabriele d’Annunzio, proclaimed a traitor from the Capitol, led his nation off the right path, yet there was beauty in his wild war-cry because it was inflamed by the love of his country and his people. And while Anatole France and d’Annunzio sang in beautiful strains the glory and the victory of their nation, most of the poets of Budapest were in the cafés talking philosophy and pacifism, and more than one among them helped forward the rebellion at the Astoria Hotel. ”

“ Such, very briefly and imperfectly given, is my scheme of self-government for India. That it is one possible—I do not say easy—to realize few will doubt who have marked the wonderful success achieved in a case not very dissimilar nearer our own shores. The Empire of Austria, within the recollection of men of the present generation, was a bureaucratic despotism of the harshest and least sympathetic kind. It had got within its rule, by conquest or inheritance, a half score of nations, owning no ties of birth or language, and united only by a common hatred of their oppressors. ”

“ After repeated conquests and restorations, the treaty of Utrecht conceded Acadia, or Nova Scotia, to Great Britain. Yet the name of Annapolis, the presence of a feeble English garrison, and the emigration of hardly five or six English families, were nearly all that marked the supremacy of England. The old inhabitants remained on the soil which they had subdued, hardly conscious that they had changed their sovereign. They still loved the language and the usages of their forefathers, and their religion was graven upon their souls. ”

“ Lord Ellenborough, who loved military display, had his tastes gratified by two more wars. In 1843 the Mahommedan rulers of Sind, known as the “meers” or amirs, whose only fault was that they would not surrender their Annexation of Sind. independence, were crushed by Sir Charles Napier. The victory of Meeanee, in which 3000 British troops defeated 20,000 Baluchis, is perhaps the most brilliant feat of arms in Indian history; but an honest excuse can scarcely be found for the annexation of the country. ”

“ Before I go on to the actual history of the Annexation there is one point I wish to submit to my reader. In England the change of Government has always been talked of as though it only affected the forty thousand white inhabitants of the country, whilst everybody seems to forget that this same land had about a million human beings living on it, its original owners, and only, unfortunately for themselves, possessing a black skin, and therefore entitled to little consideration,—even at the hands of the most philanthropic Government in the world. ”

“ The Alleman'ni were another confederation of German tribes, which took its name from including a great variety of nations. It is scarcely necessary to remark, that the name is compounded of the words all and man which still continue unchanged in our language. Their territories extended between the Danube, the Rhine, and the Maine, and they rendered themselves formidable to the Romans by their frequent inroads into Gaul and Italy during the third and fourth centuries. ”

“ Look at India, there you have existing what we should become if we all followed your philosophy, they live in their own spiritual world, and are indifferent to any other, they endure first the despotism of their own government, then a foreign conqueror, and finally lose not only freedom and independence, but civilization, and become not exactly slaves, but ignorant, superstitious barbarians."
"The German people will not get to that," said Wilhelm, smiling. ”

“ We may divide the whole Aryan family into two branches, the northern and the southern. The northern nations, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Slavonians, have each one act allotted to them on the stage of history. They have each a national character to support. Not so the southern tribes. They are absorbed in the struggles of thought, their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of existence ”

“ We offer a permanent prize and provocation to conquerors, so long as they are also despots. The military ruler has only to send in one body of his slaves in uniform and then another body of his slaves in mufti; and lands will be perpetually added to the possessions of pure despotism, amid Pacifist cheers for the principle of pure democracy.
To take a working model: suppose the Germans landed in Essex and succeeded in annexing that county. The justification of the act, by the recognised German philosophy of history, would, of course, be the easiest part of the matter ”

“ The iron rule of Austria is relaxed under the fervent heat which liberty reflects from surrounding nations. Naples and Sicily have just burst the bonds of tyranny. In Rome and the States of the Church, where, under the influence of religious and political despotism, the heart of Freedom was supposed to be petrified into insoluble hardness, that heart is now beginning to pulsate with a new life, and to throb with sympathy for humanity. Great Britain and Denmark have emancipated their slaves in the West Indies. ”

“ But the recognised negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire. Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men of state. ”

“ Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and Tuscany have already gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality. Let but Bonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years longer, and you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and neutral Denmark visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and destruction, and the independence of the nations in the North will be buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the South of Europe. ”

“ How we smote the Romans at Noreia twelve years ago, and again eight and four years ago—besides all the Gauls and Iberians and the Bull knows how many others that stood in our way—how we pushed one Roman army before us across the Adige, when they would bar Italy—how this is the host they can hope to raise against us, and we outnumber it perhaps three men to one! ”

“ It multiplies its strength only by increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of Lombardy; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. ”

“ The chief priest of the tribe presided, and each man present had the right to vote. Here questions of peace or war, violations of right or disputes between the districts were decided, criminals were tried, young men acknowledged as freemen and warriors, and, in case of approaching war, a leader chosen by the people. Alliances between the tribes, for the sake of mutual defence or invasion, were not common, at first; but the necessity of them was soon forced upon the Germans by the encroachments of Rome. ”