We had the keeping of a country, a piece of land as witness to our claim on life.
We had - generation to generation - a nation, and breathed our very own history.
We had a language, though not by choice, for it had already quickened in the soil its strength restless on the mountains.
We turned our land to chimneys of fire, planted trees and solid pylons where there was no water. We turned our nation to nurture strangers without a thought for its history, drifters like sea-wrack with no hold on the turn of the tide.
We turned the language of the ages to the language of our disgrace. Consider; is there a proverb which contains this truth: Progress is measured by a nation's shame and the peace it promotes is it's death.