Now it happened in one nation that the war party which was in control
of the foreign office, the high command, and most of the press, had
claims on the territory of several of its neighbors. These claims were
called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded
Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent
Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So
holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet
laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to
divide and conquer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each
piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their
allies found it difficult to resist, because that ally had claims for
which it hoped to find approval by the use of this same stereotype.
The first sector happened to be a mountainous region inhabited by
alien peasants. Ruritania demanded it to complete her natural
geographical frontier. If you fixed your attention long enough on the
ineffable value of what is natural, those alien peasants just
dissolved into fog, and only the slope of the mountains was visible.
The next sector was inhabited by Ruritanians, and on the principle
that no people ought to live under alien rule, they were re-annexed.
Then came a city of considerable commercial importance, not inhabited
by Ruritanians. But until the Eighteenth Century it had been part of
Ruritania, and on the principle of Historic Right it was annexed.
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