George F. Hoar: “Bancroft tells the story of thirteen States, separate, yet blending into one National life.”

The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness…

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.

This Treaty would make us a vulgar, common place empire, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and other classes forever obey.

To go fully into the role of the number three in British traditions would require a profound study; but it may be useful briefly to note its influence on the Bardic poetry-- the Triads, where the subjects are all grouped in threes.