Читать книгу Men Who Have Made the Empire онлайн

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And, lastly, Simon of Montfort has taken a swift stride through several centuries and, arriving at the modern idea that the making of nations and the ordering of the world can be achieved by Talk, has, after not a little violence and the spilling of considerable blood that might have been better spent, got together that first Parliament or Talking-Machine, whose successors have so sorely hindered the progress of the world and balked the efforts of those appointed by God, and not by the counting of noses, to do its work.

So the two noisy and somewhat foolish centuries have rolled away into a blessed oblivion with a good deal of shouting and swaggering, of strife and bloodshed, but of little progress, saving that one Roger Bacon has lived and written a certain book and made himself a name for ever.

But all this time the work with which we are here most concerned, the making of an empire, has been waiting for the next God-sent man to come and do it, and this man was Edward Plantagenet, surnamed Longlegs, next in lineal succession, not as king, but as Empire-Maker, to him who won the fight at Senlac and got himself so well obeyed that “no man durst do anything against his will”—which was a great deal to say of any one in such days as those.