Your descendants, still unborn, adjure you. You boast of your
forefathers, they cry to you, and proudly you connect yourselves with
a noble lineage. Take care that the chain may not be broken in you; so
do that we also may boast of you, and that through you, as through
a faultless link, we may connect ourselves with the same glorious
lineage. Cause us not to be compelled to be ashamed of our descent
from you as a descent that is low, barbarous, and slavish, so that
we must conceal our ancestry or must feign an alien name and an alien
lineage, lest we be immediately rejected or trodden under foot without
further test. On the next generation that will proceed from you, will
depend your fame in history: honorable, if this honorably witnesses
for you; but ignominious, even beyond desert, if you have no offspring
to speak for you, and if it is left to the victor to write your
history. Never yet has a victor had sufficient inclination or
sufficient knowledge rightly to judge the conquered. The more he
abases them, the more justified does he appear. Who can know what
mighty deeds, what magnificent institutions, and what noble customs of
many a people of antiquity have been forgotten because their posterity
was subjugated, and because, ungainsaid, the conqueror made his report
upon them in accordance with his interests?
Even foreign lands adjure you so far as they still understand
themselves in the very least, and still have an eye for their true
advantage.
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