Parliament was constantly in session, and to it the worshipful English householder and pew-renter looked with unwavering faith, waiting for its sublime wisdom and intrinsic patience, to devise ways and means, and some safe policy of safety. Even the King became earnest, perhaps a little anxious, as among the most popular doctrinaire plebiscites was the reiterated need of an abolition of the discarded system of the royal household.
From the midst of all this confusion, organized and disorganized movements, the collapse of trade, the desertion of workers, the sudden emergence of a thousand voices claiming, clamoring, debating, the physical wreck of business, the inflamed transcendentalism that saw ahead of the present moment, re-adjudication, rehabilitation, renovation of all social wrongs; and with the cruel winter breathing its desolating rigors, the snow rising in the streets, the poor dying from starvation or exposure, the steamers crowded to their taffrails, daily exporting the timid and selfish rich, or the pinched poor, escaping with a bare competency, to establish themselves under less penurious skies—from all this there suddenly grew into stalwart and national proportions, the resolve to leave England.
It grew with a certain flaming ardor of noble hopes and resolves. It grew also with an agony of doubt. The whole implication of the idea was grievously wounding to pride, and it strained at the very heart-string of the English nature. To go away from England was to become un-Englished, to lose the rich heritage of pastoral beauty, the treasured wealth of historic associations, the spot and home of literary triumphs, the soil, the air, which by some impalpable union of efficacies made the English blood and temperament, and which could not be taken away to make the same fine product elsewhere. The pathos of it! A nation wandering homeless with its Lares and Penates in its arms, its face darkened with humiliation; its shoulders, that erstwhile bore the burdens of states, bowed with the shame of enforced desertion; its voice, that summoned the freemen of the earth to convocation, silent with fear, or perhaps broken by the irrepressible echo wrung from its own anguish, at turning its back on the cradle and the home of its greatness.
And yet it grew—this same resolve—and eloquence, and poetry, and prayers, and science, and statescraft united to make it strong and beautiful, to blend in it the supernatural benisons of religion, the purified affections of the heart, and the resolute affirmations of conviction.
“My friends,”—it was Leacraft speaking from the fireside of the Bothwell Club, in Cheapside, on the night of February 12th, 1910—“I think the speech to-day of the members from Scotland in Parliament was decisive. It leaves no alternative. We cannot hopelessly, in the face of this modern world’s competition, fight out a narrowing chance for existence under the conditions facing us. And it is an unmistakable alternative. Our climate has changed, and the change is irrevocable, and it is subversive, too. We must go away, taking all that we have with us. The English nation has reached a sublime crisis. We transplant our virtues; we will relinquish our failings; we have a world of our own to choose from, and we are given an opportunity unparalleled in history.”
“It’s a great chance to begin all over again,” expostulated Jim.
“Not at all,” resumed Leacraft, his voice rising with that peculiar English intonation of tenuity, which often animates their sluggist accents, if it does not soon soar into nasal squeaks;—“Not at all. We leave England with not a thing forgotten or lost. The machinery of our greatness is in our history, and in ourselves; the products of industry and art, so far as they are necessary fixtures, stay. What of it—a cathedral, a palace here and there? They often stand for things it would be best for us to forget, and under which perhaps only revolution and violence will make us forget, if we remain as we are. What stirs my imagination, what grows visibly before me”—both Thomsen and Jim watched intently the fervid Englishman, released into a sort of mystic clairvoyance—“is a new land which is a physical unit, which has known no political subdivision, which holds within it no inherited rages, and taunting bitternesses, as these islands do to-day. Let it be Australia, let it be South Africa—though there, I admit, is the memory of a bungle—but we enter it a single people, blended into homogeneity by adversity, and we set about the tremendously interesting task of re-creating England, at least in all things pertaining to her that are great and lovable.”
“I fail to see,” said Thomsen, “that the probabilities are that way. On the contrary, freed from the geographical confinement of neighboring islands governed from London, in a new land, Irish, Scotch, English will segregate again, and then scatter, just as might mixed races of birds, who, while they are in the same cage mingle, but when they fly out, fall back into their natural groups, by the most certain of all animal tendencies, that ‘like seeks like.’”
“Well, and what of it?” retorted Leacraft. “These elements are together in a new country. It is one. There is no history behind it of subjugation and ill treatment; there can be no reversion to bickerings and recriminations where even the monuments and milestones familiarly associated with injustice have disappeared. Besides, we leave behind the obnoxious, shameless law of entail—at least we shall be free of that disgrace—and at last—but,” he added, his voice again sinking to a pained whisper, “with what a wrench!”
“Well, Mr. Leacraft,” spoke up Jim Skaith again, “it’s mair than moving that has to be done. There’s the new land to be bought and settled. There’s getting there, and biding there. There’s schools to be built, and hames and shops, and, it seems to me, with pardon for being so forward, that if it took so many years to make a great city, it’s no fule’s wark to sail ower the seas and pit it up again”; then, after a pause, “An’ it’s never the auld hame.”