We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded until today by our remoteness and obscurity. Now, the furthest corner of Britain is laid bare, and the unknown always passes for the marvelous. But there are no more nations beyond us—nothing but waves and rocks—and the Romans, more deadly still, whose arrogance you will in vain seek to escape by obedience and submission. Ravagers of the world, having exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if poor, they lust for domination; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men, they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. Robbery, slaughter, plunder, they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. Nature has willed that every man's children and kindred should be his dearest; yet these are torn from us by conscriptions to serve in foreign lands, while our wives and sisters, though they may escape the ravisher, are polluted under the name of friendship and hospitality. Our goods and fortunes are consumed in tributes, our land and yearly produce in the supply of grain. Even the hands and bodies of us Britons are worn out in clearing forests and swamps under daily blows and insults. And as if slaves who have only one master were not miserable enough, we are now being handed over, one by one, to be worked to death by the overseers and bureaucrats.