You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.
You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.
You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.
You had no control over the selection of your parents or the date and place of your birth. The advantages which saved you from having it happen to you were the merest accidents; they did not arise from your own inherent merit. It was your good luck to be born in America. No protest of yours could have prevented your being born in Central Europe. So, had it not been for the fortune of your birth, it might have happened to you.
But perhaps you think that though you had been born in Central Europe, the horrors of injustice and famine, described in these pages, would not have been shared by you. You would have risen above them; you would have been too astute, too far-sighted, too resourceful to be entrapped by them. Whoever else had gone under, you by your superior capacity for industry would have dug yourself out on top.
You wouldn't. Industry, astuteness, farsightedness, resourcefulness-none of these admirable qualities would have saved you. You must disabuse your mind of the prejudice that the starving peoples of the stricken countries are shiftless, unemployable, uncivilised, or in any way inferior to yourself. To tell the truth you are probably exactly the sort of person who, had you been born in Central Europe, would have gone to the bottom first. You belong to the middle or upper class. You are highly intelligent and specialised. You gain your living with your brains and not with your hands. If society were disrupted and temporarily bankrupt, so that the delicate mechanism of modern business ceased to function, your way of earning your living would no longer find a market. You would have to turn from working with your brains to working with your hands. Everyone in your class would be doing the same; there would not be enough manual labour to go round. You might have made investments in the days of your prosperity; but in the face of national insolvency your former thrift would not avail you. Your investments would be so much worthless paper, totally unnegotiable. You might have hoarded actual cash, the way the peasants do in their stockings. Even this reserve would soon be exhausted since, by reason of the depreciation in the currency, it would take a hundred times more money to purchase any service or commodity than it used. In starving Central Europe it is the doctors, professors, engineers, artists, musicians, business men, lawyers-the intellectual wealth of the nations, who have been the first to perish. The further they had dug themselves out of the pit of crude manual labour, where all labour starts, the more precipitous was their descent.
But perhaps you think that though these things might have happened to you, you would not have deserved them-not in the sense that Central Europe deserves them. Had you been an Austrian your moral fineness would have revolted against your countrymen's war of opportunism and aggression. Perhaps! But men act in crowds and the probabilities are against you. All the enemy peoples with whom I have conversed, have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed-liberty, justice, righteousness. Had their Governments not convinced them that their inheritance of freedom was in danger, they would not have risked their happiness in carnage. This at least is certain, whatever else is in doubt: the ordinary, home-loving citizen, whatever his nationality, only becomes a soldier and makes himself a target for shell-fire under the compulsion of a lofty motive. It was the bad fortune of the citizens of the Central Powers that their lofty motives were the offspring of lies-lies retailed to them as truth by the criminals and casuists who were their leaders. Had we been of their citizenship, should we have been more alert to discern the falsehood?
That I should write in this spirit, pleading for our late enemies, may cause a slight amazement in a public who have read my war-books. My reason-I will not say my excuse:-is that I have visited our late enemies' need and in the presence of human agony animosity dies. One ceases to question how far their suffering is the outcome of their folly; his sole desperation is to bind up their wounds-especially the wounds of their children. When witnessing death and starvation on the wholesale scale now prevailing in Europe, he forgets his austere self-righteousness and substitutes mercy for justice. "It might have happened to me," he says; "these women might have been my wife, my mother, my sisters, and these children, save for the grace of God, might have been my children."
One never believes that his own calamities are possible until they have happened. He thinks of himself proudly, as an individual immune from the contagion of adversity. It was so that the Russian aristocrats thought of themselves. If in the summer of 1914 the stranger of The Third Floor Back had mysteriously appeared at the Imperial Court in Petrograd and had announced, "Unless you have compassion and share with the outcast, the day will come when there will not be a peasant in Russia as forlorn as you," he would have been laughed ta scorn and sent into exile. Yet that day has come. In Warsaw you may see the princesses, the generals, the fops, the plutocrats, the law-givers of that resplendent Court, clothed in rags, their feet in sodden boots, waiting their turn in the breadline. After such a sight, no reversal of fortunes, however far-fetched, seems impossible. It might happen to anybody. It might happen to me or you. There is even a likelihood that it will happen unless we learn to have compassion. Central Europe will not die patiently of starvation indefinitely. Nations which civilisation has condemned to starve to death have nothing to lose by giving way to violence; they may have something to gain by it The more desperate their need becomes, the more likely they are to risk the gamble. They would at least get the satisfaction before they perished of making other nations, which had been heedless of their misery, as outcast as themselves. There lies the danger.
So, however fanciful it may seem to say in writing of Central Europe, "It might have happened to you," there is a grim possibility about the final statement, "It may happen yet."
Out To Win: The Story of America in France by Coningsby Dawson
The excessively thin man glanced up from the puddle of lime that he was stirring and regarded the excessively fat man with a smile of meek interrogation.
It happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.
"I heard you're going to marry Marcelo. Is this perhaps your revenge against me? It's very laughable, Renee. That man can barely function." Her foster family, her cheating ex, everyone thought Renee was going to live in pure hell after getting married to a disabled and cruel man. She didn't know if anything good would ever come out of it after all, she had always thought it would be hard for anyone to love her but this cruel man with dark secrets is never going to grant her a divorce because she makes him forget how to breathe.
"Take the money and disappear." I froze, my breath catching in my throat. "What...?" "You heard me." His forest-green eyes, once warm and captivating, were icy and unyielding now, cutting through me like shards of glass. "Take the money and get the fuck out of my life. I don't want you, Amber." *** Rejected and disowned by her own family for being an Omega, Amber Queen's life has been the definition of difficult. She is unexpectedly marked during a night of passion with her mate, who also turns out to be her best friend's boyfriend. Rayne rejects her despite the bond and casts her aside in favor of being with his boyfriend. Now Amber is alone, pregnant and stuck with a bond that's slowly going to kill her as Rayne continues his relationship with Reed, abandoned by everyone who was supposed to love her. Follow Amber's journey as she fights her way through hardship and rises to the top. She's determined to make them pay. Each and every last one of them. 18+ Content, ABO (Omegaverse) story.
After being kicked out of her home, Harlee learned she wasn't the biological daughter of her family. Rumors had it that her impoverished biological family favored sons and planned to profit from her return. Unexpectedly, her real father was a zillionaire, catapulting her into immense wealth and making her the most cherished member of the family. While they anticipated her disgrace, Harlee secretly held design patents worth billions. Celebrated for her brilliance, she was invited to mentor in a national astronomy group, drew interest from wealthy suitors, and caught the eye of a mysterious figure, ascending to legendary status.
Fiona's life is shattered, she never imagined life will get this cruel after a rogue attack kills her pack and silences her wolf, leaving her a mute orphan. Despite her longstanding crush on Michael, her fated mate and Alpha, he chooses another as his Luna. Forced into a hidden marriage out of duty, Fiona gives Michael her loyalty and bears his child, but he never loves her. When she leaves with their unborn child, Michael vows revenge but is unprepared for Fiona's transformation into a strong, independent woman. As tension mounts between them, a disgraced Alpha, Lucan, once thought dead seeks to capture their son, believing he poses a threat to purebloods. Fiona and Michael must unite as leaders and parents to protect their child, who holds the key to an ancient prophecy. Together, they'll face a looming war where love must prevail against destiny and vengeance.
In her past life, Vivian Grant was seen as a powerless beauty trapped by the cold and ruthless Alexander Brooks. Even he believed she never loved him. But when enemies closed in, it was Vivian who sacrificed everything, including her own family, to avenge him. Now reborn, Vivian refuses to hide her strength. She's revealing her true identity, claiming her power, and rewriting her fate. No more submission, no more misunderstandings-this time, she'll take control of her life and her love. As regretful brothers beg for forgiveness and powerful enemies fall at her feet, Vivian has one goal: to rise without mercy and make the man she once loved fall for her all over again-on her terms.
For three quiet, patient years, Christina kept house, only to be coldly discarded by the man she once trusted. Instead, he paraded a new lover, making her the punchline of every town joke. Liberated, she honed her long-ignored gifts, astonishing the town with triumph after gleaming triumph. Upon discovering she'd been a treasure all along, her ex-husband's regret drove him to pursue her. "Honey, let's get back together!" With a cold smirk, Christina spat, "Fuck off." A silken-suited mogul slipped an arm around her waist. "She's married to me now. Guards, get him the hell out of here!"
© 2018-now CHANGDU (HK) TECHNOLOGY LIMITED
6/F MANULIFE PLACE 348 KWUN TONG ROAD KL
TOP
GOOGLE PLAY