Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/362

296 have been built. Fifty years ago Prussia resolved to transform itself into a great empire. To this end, it picked a quarrel with its neighbour Austria and defeated her. Then it attacked its small neighbour Denmark, broke her, and stole one of her provinces. Then it brought about a war with France, crushed her and stole two provinces from her. Then, having menaced or persuaded the weaker German states into combining with it, it settled down to forty years of subtle, strenuous preparation on a gigantic scale with the avowed object of seizing Belgium, and more of France, and annexing divers other lands by murderous, irresistible might and so achieving a mammoth empire and world domination. The fruit of its labour is an empire that has sprung up like the unwholesome fungus-growth of a night, and the signs are that it will prove as transitory as any toadstool.

Never at any period of her history has Britain developed in this furtive and obscene fashion. Our empire is not the realisation of any deliberate plan; it has