OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Immorality

Edition of 1920. See also Immorality on Wikipedia, and the disclaimer.
IMMORALITY, in general, a course of conduct at variance with the accepted standards of a community, and more especially those of a sexual character. Until recent times the law except in a few instances took no cognizance of immoral acts which in their consequences affect only the immediate participants, but the present tendency everywhere appears to be the extension of the law to regulate the private lives of persons, subjecting at the same time all offenders to legal penalties. See Adultery; Drunkenness; Fornication; Gambling.
# The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/In the Valley

Edition of 1920. See also In the Valley on Wikipedia, and the disclaimer.
IN THE VALLEY (1890), by Harold Frederic, is eminently representative of the historical novels which, during the later years of the 19th century in the United States, contended, for a time successfully, with the prevailing vogue of realism. As in so many stones of the type, the hero — a Mohawk Valley Dutchman — finds himself pitted against a brilliant villain — of course a British officer — who for a time wins the heroine — thrown among “Tories” and British but steadfastly loyal to her native colony — only in the end to lose her to the slow-witted, though courageous and honorable Douw Mauverensen, who is historian as well as hero of the tale. The book adheres to the New York tradition, early set down in Irving and Cooper, of respect for Dutch prudence, suspicion of British perfidy and active prejudice against all New Englanders, particularly those from Connecticut. There are also faithful black slaves and ferocious Indians. So far ‘In the Valley’ accepts the conventions of its order, but it goes beyond them in other respects, for it lacks the customary tinsel of archaisms and pretensions, and is not always sentimental. Frederic, later distinguished by his energetic naturalism, was, in this romance, prophetically spare and terse. Years of preparation, he said, went to the making of the book, which is full of unobtrusive erudition regarding life in the Mohawk Valley and in Albany from 1757 to 1777, when the diverse nationalities of the region were drawing together into a common Americanism. For them it was both a civil and a foreign war; the battle of Oriskany, by checking the British and Indians, not only left the valley in the hands of the colonials but also prevented the junction of St. Leger and Burgoyne and so contributed to the decision reached at Saratoga. ‘In the Valley,’ compact and dramatic throughout,
comes to its fitting climax with the fight at Oriskany.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Night of Our Ultimatum

​ THE NIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATUM Our nation knew everything now, and had made her choice, yet the twelve hours' interval between noon and midnight of August 4 were perhaps the gravest moments in her modern history. I am tempted, not without some misgivings, but with the confidence of a good intention, to trespass so far on personal information as to lift the curtain on a private scene in the tremendous tragic drama.
The place is a room in the Prime Minister's house in Downing Street. The Prime Minister himself and three of the principal members of his Cabinet are waiting there for the reply to the ultimatum which they sent to Germany at noon. The time for the reply expires at midnight. It is approaching eleven o'clock. In spite of her "infamous proposal," the Ministers cannot even yet allow themselves to believe that Germany will break her pledged word. She would be so ​palpably in the wrong. It is late and she has not yet replied, but she will do so—she must. There is more than an hour left, and even at the last moment the telephone bell may ring and then the reply of Germany, as handed to the British Ambassador in Berlin, will have reached London.
It is a calm autumn evening, and the windows are open to St. James's Park, which lies dark and silent as far as to Buckingham Palace in the distance. The streets of London round about the official residence are busy enough and quivering with excitement. We British people do not go in solid masses surging and singing down our Corso, or light candles along the line of our boulevards. But nevertheless all hearts are beating high—in our theatres, our railway stations, our railway trains, our shops, and our houses. Everybody is thinking,"By twelve o'clock to-night Germany has got to say whether or not she is a perjurer and a thief."
Meanwhile, in the silent room overlooking the park time passes slowly. In spite of the righteousness of our cause, it is an awful thing to plunge a great empire into war. The miseries and horrors of warfare rise before the eyes of the Ministers, and the sense of personal responsibility becomes almost unsupportable. Could anything be more awful than to have to ask oneself some day in the future, awakening in the middle of the ​night perhaps, after rivers of blood have been shed, "Did I do right after all?" The reply to the ultimatum has not even yet arrived, and the absence of a reply is equivalent to a declaration of war.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Old Soldier of Liberty

​THE OLD SOLDIER OF LIBERTY And Italy! Although it is only since May that Italy has stood by our side on the battlefront, in an effort to avert from the world a new military domination, we have known from the beginning that her heart was with the Allies, and she was willing to stake all, when her time came, for the same principles of humanity and freedom. A Roman friend tells me that he heard an Italian statesman say, "Italy always meant war." We can well believe it. We have believed it from the first. On one of the early days of August, when a British regiment was passing through the streets of London on its way to Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man in a red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with a proud step by the side of our soldiers. He ​turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been living many years in Soho. Having dug up from his time-beaten trunk the simple regimentals of the army of the Liberator, he had come out to walk with our boys on the first stage of their journey to France. In the person of that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted Italy—Italy that had known what it was to make her own sacrifices for the right, and was now ready to show us her sympathy in this supreme crisis in our history.
But she had a trying, almost a tragic, time. For ten long months she lay under the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies, and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to a Triple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point) to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whose emperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts to rule even the papacy from across the Rhine.
How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption; perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost Oriental in his ​"sense of the theatre," and knows better, perhaps, than any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life) played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: "Holy Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my honour, the nuns will do so."
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Part Played by France

​THE PART PLAYED BY FRANCE Perhaps the next great flash as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the past 365 days was that which revealed at its sublimest moment the part played by France. In those evil days of July 1914, when German diplomacy was carrying on the indecent pretence of quarrelling with France about Austria's right to punish Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, there were Frenchmen still living who had vivid memories of three bloody campaigns.
Some could remember the Crimean War. More could recall the Italian War of 1859, which brought the delirious news of the victory of Magenta, and closed with Solferino, and the triumphant march home through the Place de la Bastille, and down the Rue de la Paix. And vast numbers were still alive who could remember 1870, when the Emperor was defeated at Worth and conquered at Sedan; when Paris was surrounded by a Prussian army, when the booming of cannon could be heard on the boulevards; when tenderly nurtured women, who had never ​thought to beg their bread, had been forced by the hunger of their children to stand in long queues at the doors of the bakers' shops; when the city was at length starved into submission, and the proud French people, with their immemorial heritage of fame, were compelled to permit the glittering Prussian helmets to go shining clown their streets.
A new generation had been born to France since even the last of these events, but was it with a light heart that she took up the gage which Germany so haughtily threw down? Indeed, no! Never had France, the bright, the brilliant, the cheerful-hearted, shown the world a graver face. A few students across the Seine might shout "À Berlin! À Berlin!" just as our boys in khaki chalked up the same address on their gun carriages. Idlers in blouses along the quays might scream the "Marseillaise." Gangs of ruffians in back streets might break the windows of the shops of German tradespeople. Some bitter old campaigners might talk about revenge. But when the drums beat for the French regiments to start away for Alsace and the Belgian frontier, the heart of France was calm and steadfast.
"This is a fight for the right, for France, and for the freedom of our souls!"
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Part Chance Played

​THE PART CHANCE PLAYED But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his letter the ​pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressed that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British intervention, when his neighbour said: "But what about Belgium? You have promised to protect her, and if you don't do so she will be destroyed."
That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by the strong. The result was swift and sure—the letter in the Minister's pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.
Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision among our people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with the consequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany ("Hands off Belgium,") contributed to the making of the war. But it is at least an evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance that if unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers of good. Yet so strangely do ​the invisible forces confound the plans of men that the crowning proof of this came two days later—on August 3, in the Commons—when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, and practically declared for war.
It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House that day expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. Sir Edward Grey's speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect of being unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together, the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongue of one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision that have never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifest sincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelming effect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himself may have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to a British gentleman. "You can't stand by and do nothing while the friend by your side is being beaten to his knees. You can't let a mischievous and unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour whom he has joined with you in swearing to protect?" There was no resisting that. Our own interest might leave us cold; we might even be sceptical of our danger. But we were put on our honour, and every man in the House with the instincts ​of a gentleman was swept away by that appeal as by a flood.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Part Played by Belgium

​ THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of the flashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was that which revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record of greater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Such strength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddenness of surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany's spokesmen, including Herr Ballin, Prince von Bülow, and even Professor Harnack (all "honourable men," and the last of them a churchman), that down to a few days before the outbreak of hostilities "not one human being" among them had "dreamt of war," it is the fact that within a few hours of the dispatch of Germany's ultimatum to Belgium, before the ink of it could yet be dry and while the period of England's ultimatum in ​defence of Belgian integrity was still unexpired, the German legions were attacking Liege.
It was a cowardly and contemptible assault, but what a resistance it met with! A little peace-loving, industrial nation, infinitely small and almost utterly untrained, compared with the giant in arms assailing it, having no injury to avenge, no commerce to capture, no territory to annex, desiring only to be left alone in the exercise of its independence, stood up for six days against the invading horde, and hurled it back.
But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right, and after a flash of Belgium's unexampled bravery we were compelled to witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liege fell before overwhelming numbers, then Namur, Termonde, Brussels, Louvain, and, last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror! The harvests of Belgium trodden into the earth, her beautiful cities and ancient villages given up to the flames, her historic monuments, which had been associated with the learning and piety of centuries, razed to the ground ; and, above everything in its pathos and pain, the multitudes of her people, old men, old women, young girls, and little children in wooden shoes, after the unnameable atrocities of a brutalized, infuriated, and licentious soldiery, flying before their faces as before a plague!
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Morning After

​THE MORNING AFTER If Mr. Maeterlinck's theory is sound, that this war is the visible reflection of a vast, invisible conflict, what a gigantic battle of the unseen forces of good and evil must have been raging throughout the universe when Europe rose on the morning of August 5, 1914! Think what had happened. While the light was dawning, the sun was rising, and the birds were singing over Europe, the greater nations were preparing to turn a thousand square miles of it into a gigantic slaughter-house. After forty years of unbroken peace, in which civilization, as represented by law, science, surgery, medicine, art, music, literature, and above all religion, in their ancient and central home, had been striving to lift up man to the place he is entitled to in the scheme of creation, war had suddenly stepped in to drag him back to the condition of the barbarian. From this day onward he was to live in holes in the ground, to be necessarily unclean, inevitably verminous, and liable to loathsome diseases. Although hitherto law-abiding, and perhaps even pious, with an ever-developing sense of the value and sanctity of human life, he was henceforward to take joy in the destruction of thousands of his fellow-creatures by devilish machines of death, and not to shrink from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He ​was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had. been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all other nations.
"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and we shall make amends as soon as our military necessities have been served."
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Motherhood of France

​THE MOTHERHOOD OF FRANCE Still the soul of France did not fail her. It heard the second approach of that monstrous Prussian horde, which, like a broad, irresistible tide, sweeping across one half of Europe, came down, down, down from Mons until the thunder of its guns could again be heard on the boulevards. And then came the great miracle! Just as the sea itself can rise no higher when it has reached the top of the flood, so the mighty army of Germany had to stop its advance thirty kilomètres north of Paris, and when it stirred again ​it had to go back. And back and back it went before the armies of France, Britain, and Belgium, until it reached a point at which it could dig itself into the earth and hide in a long serpentine trench stretching from the Alps to the sea.
Only then did the spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as of lightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before the white statue of Jeanne d'Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St. Michael 10,000 of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on the broad space in front of the majestic facade, to call on the Maid of Orleans to intercede with the Virgin for victory. It was a great and grandiose scene, recalling the days when faith was strong and purer. Old and young, rich and poor, every woman with some soul that was dear to her in that inferno at the front—the Motherhood of France was there to pray to the Mother of all living to ask God for the triumph of the right.
"Jesus, hear our cry for our country! Justice for France, O God!"
And in the spirit of that prayer the soul of France still lives.
# The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The New Scarlet Letter

​THE NEW SCARLET LETTER It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneous death, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lying between trenches, perhaps, on the "no-man's ground" which neither friend nor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark night coming on, and then dying in the cold shiver of the dawn. Yes, it is brave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver in a woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to provide for, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in the blood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is not in the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet such is her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies to the scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of the man-at-arms.
On the breasts that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who have fallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarlet letter—the badge not of shame, but glory. And "through the rolling of the drums" and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in this year of service and sacrifice whose message no one can mistake. Woman, who faces death every time she brings a man-child into the world, must henceforth know what is to be done with ​him. It is her right, her natural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it.
# The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Lafuente y Zamalloa, Modesto

Edition of 1920. See also Modesto Lafuente y Zamalloa on Wikipedia, and the disclaimer.
LAFUENTE Y ZAMALLOA, lạ'fwān'tā ē thä-mal-yō'ạ, Modesto, Spanish historian: b. Ravanal de los Caballeros, 1 May 1806; d. 25 Oct. 1866. After receiving his education in philosophy and theology he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Astorga (1832), and two years later succeeded to the chair of theology there. Abandoning this some years afterward, he went to Madrid where he began writing political and theatrical criticisms for the newspapers, under the pen names of Fray Gerundio and Pelegrin Tirabeque. These essays were collected as ‘Capilladas’ (1837-40) and as ‘Teatro social del siglo XIX’ (1846). But his chief title to fame rests on his ‘Historia general de España’ (30 vols., 1850-67), a monumental work, later edited and revised by Juan Valera (25 vols., 1887-90). Other historical works by Lafuente include ‘Viaje aërostático de Fray gerundio y Tirabeque’ (1847), and ‘Revista europea’ (1848-49).
# The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Lagarde, Paul Anton

Edition of 1920. See also Paul de Lagarde on Wikipedia, and the disclaimer.
LAGARDE, lạ'gärd', Paul Anton, German Orientalist: b. Berlin, 2 Nov. 1827; d. Göttingen, 22 Dec. 1891. He studied theology and Oriental languages at Berlin and became (1851) adjunct instructor of the Halle University, but continued (1852-53) his studies at London and Paris, returning to Halle to lecture. He taught at several schools of science, from 1866, at Berlin and Schleusingen and was made (1869) professor of Oriental languages at Göttingen University. The most important of his astonishingly numerous and many-sided philological works are ‘Gesammelte Abhandlungen’ (Leipzig 1866) ‘Mitteilungen’ (Göttingen 1884-91); ‘Uebersicht über die im Aramäischen, Arabischen und Hebräischen übliche Bildung der Nomina’ (ib. 1889); ‘Semitica’ (Göttingen 1878-79); ‘Orientalia’ (ib. 1879-80); ‘Symmicta’ (ib. 1877-80); ‘Petri Hispani de lingua
Arabica libri’ (Göttingen 1883); ‘Ægyptiaca’ (ib. 1875); ‘Bibliothecæ Syriacæ’ (ib. 1892); ‘Armenische Studien’ (ib. 1877); ‘Persische Studien’ (ib. 1884). He also wrote several poems which were published by Anna de Lagarde (Göttingen 1897). His great learning and gifts were curiously mixed with dogmatism and distrust in the activities of others. His ‘Deutsche Schriften’ (4th ed., Göttingen 1903) deals with the position of the German state to theology, the Church and religion. His library now belongs to the New York University. Consult Lagarde, Anna de, ‘Paul de Lagarde, Errinnerungen aus seinem Leben’ (Göttingen 1894).
# The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Lagarto

Edition of 1920. See also Lagarto on Wikipedia, and the disclaimer.
LAGARTO. The Spanish word for “lizard.” It was applied by the early Spanish explorers of Central America to the alligator, and their use of the word clung to the literature of the natural history of the New World for many years.