“They talk of the war! Let them come close in! Let them see lying around emaciated heads with no bodies within a couple of hundred yards; let them see the bloody confusion of heads and entrails and limbs which is showered around when a trench is mined; let them see the heads with ears and noses bitten off as if by mad dogs; let them see the men driven insane by the sights and sounds of the battlefield, who turn and rend their comrades and have to be shot down by them; let them come where hundreds of wounded men are lying on contested ground screaming the whole night through (and not one in a million has ever heard a man scream!) and then talk of the war!”
If from this horror, fought through and endured, as we believe, for the future of our Land and the future of mankind, there is to come no blessing, no advance to freedom and health and justice. . . . What then? Nothing will be easier than to take up again the peace life of Britain as it was, and worse than it was, because coarsened by the passions of war, and embittered by the strain of a greater economic stress. Nothing will be easier than to give rein to the instincts of greed, pugnacity, and rancour, now hard held in by sentiment and the common peril; to step back and walk blindly in a country where all is faction; where class shuns class, and men and women are bitterly opposed; where the youth of the nation is all the time running to seed; where children go hungry and millions throughout the land are miserably housed and fed; where the access to justice is often still beyond the reach of the poor; where helplessness is not yet a guarantee against ill-usage. Once the war effort is over, nothing will be easier than—from a resolved and united nation—to become a crowd pressing this way and that, without view and without vision, seeking purse and place, or, at the best, fulfilment of small factious policies.
No one can tell yet what will be the world-sequel of this war—whether it will bring a long peace or other wars; the enlargement of democracy or the hardening of autocratic rule; the United States of Europe or a congery of distrustful Powers working for another “Day.” Only one thing we know, that in our charge will be our own national life, to make or to mar; to prepare against whatever fortune the outer world shall brew, to prepare against the subtle march of inward dissolution. Our future does not lie on the knees of the gods; it lies in our own hands, and hearts, and brains, and the use that we shall make of them.
Swift is the descent to hell, and no wings fly so fast thither as the wings of material success. Shall we go that way? Or shall we, having fixed our eyes on a goal far beyond the finish of this war, quietly, resolutely in our conduct to the outer world and in our national life, begin at once transmuting into deeds those words: Freedom, Health, Justice for All?
As a man thinks and dreams, so does he act. It is time to think and dream a little of the future, while the spirit of unity is on us, the vision of our Country with us; so that, when we see again the face of Peace, we may continue to act in unity, having in our hearts the good of our Land, and in our eyes the vision of her, growing ever to truer greatness and beauty.
THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED
(Read at a Conference on the National Life of the Allied Countries, Stratford-on-Avon, August, 1916.)
I suppose there are Britons who have never seen the sea; thousands, perhaps—unfortunate. But is there a Briton who has not in some sort the feeling that he is a member of a great ship’s crew? Is there one who never rejoices that his Land sails in space, unboarded, untouched by other lands? It must be strange to be native of a country where, strolling forth, one may pass into the fields or woods of another race. In all that we are, have been, and shall be, the sea comes first—the sea, sighing up quiet beaches, thundering off headlands, the sea blue and smiling under our white cliffs, or lashing the long sands, the sea out beyond foreshore and green fields, or rolling in on wind-blown rocks and wastes. The sea with its smile, and its frown, and its restless music; the grim, loyal, protecting sea—our mother and our comrade, our mysterious friend!
The ancients dreamed of “the islands of the blessed”; we of these green and misty isles almost, I think, believe that we inhabit them.
A strange and abiding sense is love of Country! Though reason may revolt, and life here be hard, ugly, thankless, though one may even say, “I care no more for my own countrymen than for those of other lands; I am a citizen of the world!” No use! A stealing love has us fast bound; a web of who knows what memories of misty fields, and scents of clover and turned earth; of summer evenings, when sounds are far and clear; of long streets half-lighted, and town sights, not beautiful but homely; of the skies we were born beneath, and the roads we have trodden all our lives. What memories, too, of names and tales, small visions all upside down perhaps, yet true and warm to us because we listened and saw when we were no older than foals at their dams’ heels. It is not our actual Country, but its halo, that we love—the halo each one of us has made for it. There are evenings under the moon, dewy mornings, late afternoons, when over field and wood, over moor or park or town, unearthliness hovers; so, over our native land hovers a glamour that burns brighter when we are absent, and flames up in glory above her when we see her driven or hard pressed. No man yet knows the depths of our love for these islands of the blessed. May no man ever know it!