We remember in our childhood to have heard an improved version of this statement to the effect that one Boer might equal four niggers, but one Englishman would lick fifty Boers. We remember lying in our bed at night and pondering over this problem—why with such terrible partiality the God who loves all equally, should have confined all courage and fighting power to the inhabitants of Great Britain—and we had before us a vivid picture of the one solitary British soldier standing on a kopje waving his gun, while before him fled frantically fifty powerful Boers armed to the teeth but making no endeavour to secure him. The adventure of Majuba Hill came strangely to terminate this vision, nor have we ever been able to recall it save as an exploded nightmare.
[78] It is remarkable that Edison, the great American, who has so perfected electrical invention, is, like Whitman and Bret Harte, largely Dutch in his origin, his forefathers having come from Holland a hundred years ago.
[79] He does not add: And so did my fathers two hundred years ago, and all Europe and the Bible expresses faith in them; "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says God"; for this kind of Englishman is not of a discerning and analytical disposition. He never goes farther than the matter in hand; and the matter in his own hands seldom stretches farther than the length of his own nose.
[80] It is perhaps not only by good fortune that among us should have arisen Charles Darwin. Those who study his early work, the Voyage of the Beagle, when as yet he was only perceiving faintly the relation of things which he afterwards so clearly grasped, will see, curiously manifest in almost every page of that work, those great English qualities of love and freedom and human equality in freedom. Neither does it seem anything but fitting and natural that the man who first brought evidence to convince the world of the identity of all life, seen and vaguely indicated by the world's poets, from Lucretius to Goethe and Shelley, should have been an Englishman. It is not wonderful that the man who, in his youth, felt so keenly the pain of seeing the savage ill-treated or the coloured man slighted, should have been he to whom the mystery and meanings of the humblest forms of life should have been made clear and that, from the stripes on the wing of the bird and the life and motions of the worm, he should have read the open lessons that others had overlooked. Foreign peoples often wonder that he should have appeared among us, but he appeared in our own line of growth; he is an efflorescence that naturally and rightly belongs to us. He was our Englishman at his highest.
[81] How far does the passion of a workman for the tool he works with speak in us here?
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and punctuation have not been corrected.
The book cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Corrections: