The Cornishmen who were present could not understand this. I talked with one poor fellow, who sat down on a bench looking very pale, saying that after thirteen hours in the train without a wink of sleep he felt very tired; but he was greatly disappointed at not having got a seat in the first lot of conveyances which were driving off loaded with his fellow travellers to the Land's End, and feared that he might miss seeing it after all. Among those who had gathered round to hear what was said were two old Penzance men and they laughed heartily. "Why," said one, "I've been here within ten miles of the Land's End all my life and have never seen it." "I can say as much, and more," said the other; "I've never seen it and never want to see it."
"Perhaps," I remarked, "if you had been born five hundred or five thousand miles away you would have felt differently about it." The poor pale Lancastrian looked pleased. "That's true!" he exclaimed. "I've always wanted to see the Land's End, and it's the same with all of us: we've come to see it and for nothing else."
It was the literal truth, as I found by hanging about and talking with these men from the north all that day, watching them going and returning. But the motor buses, char-a-bancs and other vehicles were not enough to take them all, and when it came to three o'clock and half-past three, and there was but time left to go with all speed, look for a few brief minutes at the rocks, and hasten back in time for the last train, the poor fellows began offering five shillings per man to be driven there and back, and then at the last some offered ten shillings. But it was too late and they could not be taken!
Is this sentiment, which is not confined to our island country but survives in the transplanted race in other regions of the globe, this feeling which the matter-of-fact Cornishman laughs at and which may make many of us smile when we meet with it in a printed book, but is in us all the same and a part of our life—is this sentiment of any value and worth cherishing? I take it that it is, since if we were stripped of sentiment, illusions and such traditions, romance and dreams, as we inherit or which gather about and remain with us to the end of our days, we should be beggared indeed. Well, let it be so, it may be said in reply; 'tis in you and in many of us, and some have it not, and that's all there is to be said about it—why then speak of cherishing? For the following reason in this particular case: the sentiment relates to a locality, a spot of land with peculiar features and character, a rocky headland with the boundless ocean in front and the desolate wind-swept moor behind. These features, an image of which is carried in our minds from childhood, are bound up with and are part and parcel of the feeling, so that to make any change in such a spot, to blow up the headland, for instance, as any one could do with a few shillings' worth of dynamite, or to alter and deface the surface of the adjacent land and build big houses and other ugly structures on it, would be felt by every pilgrim as an indignity, a hateful vandalism. We have seen in the case of Hindhead and of many other places which powerfully attract us, what the greed and philistinism of man will do to destroy an ancient charm. A man may do what he likes with his own—a frightful liberty when we remember how God's footstool has been parcelled out among private persons, and what brutish men, or men without the sense of beauty, have done and may do to spoil it. I suppose that if Sir Edmund Antrobus thought proper he could run up a red-brick hotel or sanatorium high as Hankey's Mansions at Stonehenge: but not Stonehenge, nor Mona, nor Senlac, nor that hoary fane where Britain buries her great dead, nor any castle or cathedral, or tower or river or mountain or plain in all the land draws us so powerfully as this naked moor and rude foreland with its ancient dim memories and associations. And we now see what is being done with it—how plots of land for building purposes are being sold right and left, and the place in every way vulgarised and degraded.
Undoubtedly there are men so devoid of sentiment and imagination that they would not hesitate to stamp out the last beautiful thing on earth, if its beauty, or some sentiment connected with it which made it seem beautiful, is the only reason or the only excuse that can be given for its existence. But all are not of this character, and to those who have something besides Cornish tin and copper in their souls, who are not wholly devoted to their own and, incidentally, to their county's, material prosperity, I would appeal to rescue from degradation and to preserve unspoilt for all time this precious spot to which pilgrims resort from all the land.
It is not necessary, I hope, to describe the Land's End as the county's best "asset" or as the "goose that lays the golden eggs", or by some such abominable phrase, which is yet well understood by all since it appeals to the baser nature in every man—to his greed and his cunning; still, it might be well to remind even those who are wholly concerned with material things that the sentiment they make light of probably exists in some degree in a majority of the inhabitants of this country—which, be it remembered, is mainly Anglo-Saxon, a sentimental race, to use the word in its better sense—and that it is the desire of most persons to see the Land's End; also that probably nine of every ten visitors to Cornwall think of that headland as their objective point.
To save this spot it would undoubtedly have to be taken from private ownership; and, given the desire, there would be small difficulty in obtaining an Act of Parliament for the compulsory sale of a strip of the sea-front with, let us say, a couple of thousand acres of the adjoining moor. The buildings which now deform the place, the unneeded hotels, with stables, shanties, zinc bungalows sprawling over the cliff, and the ugly big and little houses could be cleared away, leaving only the ancient village of St. Sennen, the old farm-houses, the coastguard and Trinity House stations, and the old fishing hamlet under the cliff.
If a Cornish Society, formed for the purpose, and working with the County Council, could not do this without outside help, the money needed could no doubt be easily raised by public subscription. We know that very large sums are frequently given by the public for similar purposes, also for various other purposes which appeal to comparatively very few, as, for example, when the sum of £45,000 was recently given by private subscribers to purchase the Rokeby "Venus" for the National Gallery. Yet for every single subscriber to that fund, and, I may say, for every person in England who regards that canvas as a valuable acquisition, there are probably thousands who would gladly see the Land's End made a National possession, and who would willingly subscribe for such an object.
