Union is strength
In Aesop’s Fables there is a story which tells how an old man is troubled to find his sons always quarrelling among themselves. He is afraid that the family will be quite broken up when he dies. He is anxious to leave behind a united family. So one day he calls his sons together, and giving them a bundle of sticks, asks them to break them for him. Each of them tries in turn, but, though they are strong, they fail to break the sticks. Then he unties the sticks and tells them to break each stick by itself. Now they easily break the sticks. It is in this way that the old man impresses upon his sons that union is strength. He tells them that if they live together as one family, they will be strong, but if they quarrel among themselves and live separately, they will be weak.
Take a football or a hockey team. If the members of the team play together and help one another, they will form a strong team. It will be very difficult for the other teams to defeat them, But if they re split up into groups when they play in a match, they will surely be defeated.
Sometimes a school or a collage suffers seriously because the members of the staff are divided. They quarrel among themselves and neglect their work. The results are that the school or the collage goes down. Its evil name spreads abroad. Often a whole town suffers, because the municipal committee in divided into parties, which, instead of looking after the sanitation of the streets, hospitals, schools, work-houses, water-supply, or education, spend their time in throwing mud at one another.
The same is true in war. A large army, whose officers are not united among them, is very easily beaten by a smaller but untied army. It was the maxim on napoleon, ``Divide and conquer’’. He won some of his great victories by attacking a country when alone before the other nations could come to its aid; or he would weaken a strong nation by dividing it up into quarrelling parties and then he would crush it.
The same plan is adopted by those governments that want to rule another nation. They follow the policy, ``Divide and rule’’. They would crate dissensions in a nation and then rule. It is true ``united, we stand; divided, we fall.
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