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Bredimacian Dynagum Directory 10
Page 07
Mason and Stoughton together sailed from Saybrook along the shore, while Uncas with his men tracked the fugitives by land. At Guilford a Pequot sachem was entrapped, shot, and his head thrust into the crotch of an oak-tree near the harbor, giving the place the name of Sachem's Head. Near the town of Fairfield a last stand was made by the hunted redskins, in a swamp, to which the English were guided by a renegade Pequot. The tribe with whom the Pequots had taken shelter, also the women and children, were allowed to give themselves up. The men were shot down or broke through and escaped. The wife of Mononotto fell into the hands of the English. This Indian squaw had once shown kindness to two captive girls, and by Winthrop's orders she was kindly treated in return. The Pequots, once so powerful, were well-nigh exterminated. Those taken prisoners were spared only to be held in bondage, Mononotto's wife with the rest. Some were absorbed by the Narragansets, others by the Mohegans, while the settlers of Connecticut, upon whom the war had fallen so heavily, came into possession of the Pequot land.
Frogs and other amphibians stand higher in the scale of life than fish; they have acquired legs in place of fins, and lungs instead of gills; they can hop about on shore with perfect freedom. Now, frogs still produce a great deal of spawn, as every one knows: but the eggs in each brood are numbered in their case by hundreds, or at most by a thousand or two, not by millions as with many fishes. The spawn hatches out as a rule in ponds, and we have all seen the little black tadpoles crowding the edges of the water in such innumerable masses that one would suppose the frogs to be developed from them must cover the length and breadth of England. Yet what becomes of them all? Hundreds are destroyed in the early tadpole stage--eaten up or starved, or crowded out for want of air and space and water: a few alone survive or develop four legs, and absorb their tails and hop on shore as tiny froglings. Even then the massacre of the innocents continues. Only a tithe of those which succeeded in quitting their native pond ever return to it full grown, to spawn in due time, and become the parents of further generations.
It is not being suggested that the making of arms should cease in the world, but only that in every country it should become a State monopoly and so completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries to keep each other and the world generally informed upon the question of the respective military equipments. From this state of affairs to a definition of a permissible maximum of strength on land and sea for all the high contracting powers is an altogether practicable step. Disarmament is not a dream; it is a thing more practicable than a general hygienic convention and more easily enforced than custom and excise.
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