Importance to National Life
all manly feeling of personal liberty in a people, and to insure despotism an unresisted conquest. That the same door through which despotism and arbitrariness enter stands open for the foreign enemy also, is not considered; and only when the enemy is actually there, and it is too late, do the wise come to recognize that the moral power and the feeling of legal right of a people are the most effectual rampart which can be raised against external enemies. It was at the time that the peasant and citizen were the subjects of feudal and absolute arbitrariness that Alsace and Lorraine were lost to the German Empire. How could those provinces have for the empire a feeling which they had ceased to have for themselves?
But it is our own fault if we understand the teachings of history only after it is too late; it is not its fault if we do not understand them in time, for it preaches them, always, in such a manner that we may understand them and profit by them. The power of a people is synonymous with the strength of their feeling
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