Page:Gilbert Keith Chesterton - How to Help Annexation (1918).djvu/9

 Rh English and not a German population, will lead nearly all of them to assert the English character of Essex, and even lead many of them to migrate into Middlesex. A despotic German officialism has then only to send a crowd of official colonists in the track of her official armies; and Essex is secured for ever by what is solemnly described as a popular vote. The invader then proceeds to fix the same imperial eye upon Middlesex; and the game is continued at the option of the player.

Clearly, then, the upholders of "no annexation" have here invented an ingenious trick, first for making annexation incessant, and second for making it safe. And the annexation, it is equally clear, will be most incessant and most safe when it is done by rulers who are imperial Princes and not popular magistrates. Considered as a principle applicable over long and varying epochs of the past (as it, would certainly, if accepted, be applied over long and very varying epochs of the future), it would have meant that in every case a wave of slavery and savagery could wash out all that had preceded it. It would, for instance, have encouraged and completed the work of every one of those Asiatic inundations from which our culture barely escaped. It would have helped the Persians to dispossess the Greeks; for the Persians, admittedly, enormously outnumbered the Greeks; and all the Persians would have obeyed the great King, while the Athenians were generally rather too republican to obey the great republic. The German Emperor told his soldiers to behave like Huns; and we have in this another incidental instance of the