[Footnote 48: Born In New York; a prolific writer, eminent for his profound scholarship, his wide acquaintance with Oriental and Biblical literature, and his originality and freedom of mind: long Professor of Greek in Union College.]
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From "State Rights."
=163.= CRUEL INTESTINE WARS CAUSED BY NATIONAL DIVISION.
If it were Death alone! But "Hell follows hard after." What a heaving Tartarus was Greece, when all hope of a true nationality was given up! From Corcyra to Rhodes, from Byzantium to Cyrene, one bloody scene of faction, "sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion." In the cities, in the isles, in the colonies, banishments, confiscations, ostracisms, and cruel deaths. The most ferocious parties everywhere, fomented in the smaller States by the influence of the larger, and kept alive in the leading cities by the continual presence of foreign emissaries. With us it would be far more like Satan's kingdom, inasmuch as our states are more numerous, relatively more petty, and, from the increased powers of modern knowledge and modern invention, capable of the greater mutual mischief.
We are not prophesying at random. Here is our old guidebook. The road is all mapped out, the way surveyed, by which we march to ruin. All the dire calamities of Greece may be traced to this word autonomia.[49]
… Greece presented the first great proof of a fact of which we are now in danger of furnishing another and more terrible example to the world. It is the utter impossibility of peace, in a territory made by nature a geographical unity, inhabited by a people, or peoples, of one lineage, one language, bound together in historical reminiscences, yet divided into petty sovereign States too small for any respectable nationalities themselves, and yet preventing any beneficent nationality as a whole. No animosities have been so fierce as those existing among people thus geographically and politically related. No wars with each other have been so cruel; no home factions have been so incessant, so treacherous, and so debasing. The very ties that draw them near only awaken occasions of strife, which would not have existed between tribes wholly alien to each other in language and religion.
[Footnote 49: State sovereignty.]
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=Horace Greeley,[50] 1811-1873.=