Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the
course of history. Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is
only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their
hearts. It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an
enterprise the victims do not count. As an emotional outlet for the
oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and
then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body
into three pieces. There was really nothing to do but to drop a few
tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of
the nation refused to rest therein. It haunted the territories of the
Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion
where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed,
and pooh-pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a
strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors. Poland
deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its
religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere
geographical expression.
Pages:
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171