Fourth: Great Britain is destined by Providence to be a great educator of nations. That is her part in history. She has democracy and tradition—two things that are considered everywhere as incongruous—and therefore she is capable of understanding everybody and of teaching and leading everybody. She is the nurse for the sick people of the East; she is the schoolmaster for the rough people of the wild isolated islands; she is the tamer of the cannibals and the guide of the civilised; she inspires, vivifies, unites and guides; she equalises; she Christianises.
I read the other day a German menacing song:
We are going, we are going to see
Who will henceforth govern the world—
England or God?
I can say certainly—God. He will govern the world. But we can say to-day, though in due humility: Gesta Dei per Britannos. Would you know assuredly through which of the powerful
nations God is working to-day? Ask only which of these nations is most the champion of the rights of the small and poor nations, and you will find out the truth. For from the beginning of the world-history all the leading religions and philosophies called the great and powerful to protect the poor and powerless. The record of this recommendation belongs doubtless to the Christian religion. The suggestion of all the religions was like this: it is impossible to be proud and selfish under the eyes of God. The suggestion of the Christian religion is: Under the eyes of God the more you have the more you must give, and the more you give the more you have; and if you even give your life for men, you will find a better life in God.
WHAT IS SERBIA THEN?
If we Serbs look upon the English power on this planet, and then look and see our own less than modest place on the globe, we must unwillingly exclaim in the words of the Psalmist: O Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?—or with a little change: O England, what is Serbia, that thou art mindful of her? And the poor sons of Serbia, that thou visitest them?
A small strip of land with five million inhabitants and without seaboard. A peasant people devoted to agriculture and to nature, to the
forest and cattle, to songs and tales. A past full of glory, of blood and sins. A present full of tears, pains and hopes. A king carried on a stretcher through the rocky desert of Albania,—a loyal parliament which refused to make a separate peace with the enemy even in the darkest hour of national tragedy,—an honest government which did everything possible to save the country, and which, when the country was nearly conquered, exclaimed through its President: "It is better to die in beauty than to live in shame!"—a fearless army, which for three years only knew victory, now watching in snow on the mountains of Montenegro and Albania, and lodging in the dens of wolves and eagles.[1] Another army of old men, of women and children, fleeing away from death and rushing to death. Shall I say that is Serbia?
No: that is only a part of Serbia.