world. If this does not come about as the final goal to which the whole previous development of our nation has been tending, then the battles we fought will turn out to be a vain and fleeting farce, and the freedom of conscience and of spirit that we won is a vain word, if from now onwards spirit and conscience are to be no more.”
229. There comes a solemn appeal to you from your descendants not yet born. “You boast of your forefathers,” they cry to you, “and link yourselves with pride to a noble line. Take care that the chain does not break off with you; see to it that we, too, may boast of you and use you as an unsullied link to connect ourselves with the same illustrious line. Do not force us to be ashamed of our descent from you as from base and slavish barbarians; do not compel us to conceal our origin, or to fabricate a strange one and to take a strange name, lest we be at once and without further examination rejected and trodden underfoot. As the next generation that proceeds from you turns out to be, so will your reputation be in history; honourable, if they bear honourable witness for you, but disgraceful even beyond your due, if your descendants may not speak for you, and the conqueror makes your history. Never yet has a conqueror had sufficient inclination or sufficient knowledge to judge the conquered justly. The more he depreciates them, the more just does he himself stand out. Who can know what great deeds, what excellent institutions, what noble customs of many a people in the ancient world have fallen into oblivion, because their descendants were forced under the yoke, while the conqueror wrote an account of them that suited his purpose, and there was none to contradict him!”
230. A solemn appeal comes to you even from foreign
