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10
A SHORT HISTORY OF WALES

those who came two thousand years ago. But this country is no longer their goal, the great continent of America has been discovered beyond. Fits of longing for wandering come over the Welsh periodically, as they came over the Danes—caused by scarcity of food and density of population, or by a sense of oppression and a yearning for freedom. An empty stomach sometimes, and sometimes a fiery imagination, sent a crowd of adventurers to new lands. And it is thus that every living nation is ever renewing its youth.


III
ROME

It is not a spirit of adventure and daring alone that makes a nation.Rome rose to say that it must have the spirit of order and law too.It rose in the path of the nations; it built the walls of its empire,guarded by the camps of its legions, right across it. For four hundred years the wandering of nations ceased; the nations stopped—and they began to till the ground, to live in cities, to form