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.  Indeed, there are spirits among all peoples who still cannot believe that the great promises made to the human race of a reign of justice, of reason, and of truth can be a vain and an empty phantom, and who assume, therefore, that the present iron age is but a transit to a better state.  They—­and all modern humanity in them—­count on you.  A great part of this humanity is descended from us; the rest have received from us religion and culture.  The former adjure us by the soil of our common fatherland, which is also their cradle, and which they have bequeathed free to us; the latter adjure us by the culture which they have acquired from us as a pledge of a higher happiness—­they adjure us to maintain ourselves as we have ever been, for their sake; and not to suffer this member, which is of so much importance, to be torn from the continuity of the race that is newly budded, lest they may painfully miss us if they some time need our counsel, our example, our cooperation toward the true goal of earthly life.

All generations, all the wise and good who have ever breathed upon this earth, all their thoughts and aspirations for something higher mingle in these voices and surround you and lift to you imploring hands.  Even Providence, if we may so say, and the divine plan of the universe in the creation of a human race—­a plan which, indeed, exists only to be thought out by man and to be realized by man—­adjures you to save its honor and its existence.  Whether those are justified who have believed that mankind must always