A. J. Dawson

“ And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept. ”

“ A little while before this time I should have felt jealous pangs when I saw her sweet face lighten and glow at a word of commendation from John Crondall. But my secretaryship was teaching me many things. No other woman could ever mean to me one tithe of all that Constance Grey meant. Of that I was very sure. To think of such women as handsome Beatrice Blaine or Sylvia Wheeler, in a vein of comparison, was for me like comparing the light of a candle in a distant window with the moon herself. ”

“ If I am certain of anything in this world, I am certain that the pursuit of pleasure never yet brought real happiness to any intelligent human being, and never will. True, I have met some happy people in London, even now, when England lies wounded from a cruel blow—a blow which I believe may prove the greatest blessing England ever knew. But those happy people are not running after pleasure or concentrating their intelligence upon their own gratification. No, no; those happy people are strenuously, soberly striving to do the whole of their duty as Christians and British citizens. ”

“ Germany's world markets became Britain's markets, just as the markets of the whole Empire became our own as the result of preference, and just as the great oversea countries of the Empire found Britain's home markets, with fifty million customers, exclusively their own. The British public learned once and for all, and in one year, the truth that reformers had sought for a decade to teach us—that the Empire was self-supporting and self-sufficing, and that common-sense legislative and commercial recognition of this fundamental fact spelt prosperity for British subjects the world over. ”

“ In one terrible week London had passed through an age of terror and humiliation, the end of which had been purchased in panic and disorder by means of a greater humiliation than any. Now England had to pay the bill. Some, in the pursuit of business and pleasure, were already forgetting; but the majority among the great concourse of Londoners who sat waiting in the Albert Hall that afternoon, clothed in their Sunday best, were still shrewdly conscious of the terrible severity of the blow which had fallen upon England. ”

“ Mordan,' Sylvia. Even your mother and sister call me Dick. No, no, the other nations would be only too glad to follow our lead, and we, as the greatest Power, should take that lead. What could their soldiers do to a soldierless people, anyhow; and even if we lost at the beginning, why, 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' Of what use is the dominion of a huge, unwieldy empire when even a tiny country like this is so administered that a quarter of its population live always on the verge of starvation? ”

“ THE DEMONSTRATION IN HYDE PARK
Winds of the World give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—
And what should they know of England who only England know?—
The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag,
They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English flag.
Rudyard Kipling. As was usually the case on the day following one of Beatrice's "fluffy" evenings, I descended to my never very tempting lodging-house breakfast on that Sunday morning feeling the reverse of cheerful, and much inclined to take the gloomiest view of everything life had to offer me. ”

“ Will ye be men—or helots and outcasts? Will you choose Duty, and the favour of God's appointed way for us, of progress and of leadership; or will you choose—pleasure, swift decay, annihilation? Upon your heads be it! Our fathers nobly did their part. Upon your choice hangs the future of our race, the fate of your children, the destiny of God's chosen people, who have paltered with strange gods, blasphemed the true faith, and stepped aside from the white path—the Only Way: Duty! ”

“ Every soul in the building stood erect, and following the choir's lead, that great gathering sang the British hymn as it was never sung before. As the last note throbbed into silence in the hall's dome, George Stairs, who had knelt through the singing of the anthem, advanced, with hand uplifted.
"God helping us, as, if we choose aright, He surely will help us, do we choose Duty, or pleasure? Choose, my kinsmen! Is it Duty, or is it pleasure?"
It was a severe test to put to such an assembly, to a congregation of all classes of London society. ”

“ I would stare out of the train windows, on my way back from Weybridge, at the countless lights, the endless huddled roofs of London; and, seeing in these a representation of the huge populace of the city, I would stretch out my arms in an impotent embrace, muttering:
"Yes, indeed, you are real; you are more important than any other consideration; you are not the mere shadows she thinks you; your service is of more moment than any miracle, or than any nursing of one's own soul!" ”

“ Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of "news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it, in tabloid form, to the public.
If one assumes for the moment that only twelve million people in Great Britain were living on hunger's extreme edge at that time, the picture I had of the sullen, angry crowd outside the baker's shop remains a sufficiently sinister one. ”

“ It is said that fatigue killed more German soldiers than fell to British bullets; and the fact may well be believed when we consider the herculean task General von Füchter had accomplished in one week. His plan of campaign was to strike his hardest, and to keep on striking his hardest, without pause, till he had the British Government on its knees before him; till he had the British public—maddened by sudden fear, and the panic which blows of this sort must bring to a people with no defensive organization, and no disciplinary training—cowed and crying for quarter. ”

“ Our national life has been a daily succession of victories since we fought for and won real peace and overcame the slavish notion that mere indolent quiescence could ever give security. Our daily victory as a race is the triumph of race loyalty over individual self-seeking; and I can conceive of no real danger for the British Empire unless the day came, which God forbid, when Englishmen forgot the gospel of our "New Century Puritanism"—the Canadian preachers' teaching of Duty and simple living. ”

“ And I, the son of an English gentleman and clergyman, graduate of an English university, I looked to this party, the Liberal Government of England, as the leaders of reform, of progress, of social betterment. And so did the country; the British public. Errors of taste and judgment we regretted. That was how we described the most ribald outbursts of the anti-British sentiment.
It is hard to find excuse or palliation. Instinct must have told us that the demands, the programme, of such diseased creatures, could only aggravate the national ills instead of healing them. ”

“ The heart of the American people has been deeply stirred by two considerations: Germany's unwarrantable insolence and arrogance, and Britain's magnificent display of patriotism, ashore and afloat, in fighting for her independence. The patriotic struggle for independence—that is what has moved the American people to forgetfulness of all jealousies and rivalries. The rather indiscreet efforts of the German sections of the American public have undoubtedly hastened this offer, and made it more generous and unqualified. ”

“ I know I can count on you all. You, Stairs, and you, Reynolds, are going to carry your Message through England. I propose to follow in your wake with mine. You rouse them to the sense of duty; I show them their duty. You make them ready to do their duty; I show it them. I'll have a lecturer. I'll get pictures. They shall feel the invasion, and know what the German occupation means. You shall convert them, and I'll enlist them."
"Enlist them! By Jove! that's an idea," said Forbes Thompson. "A patriotic league, a league of defenders, a nation in arms." ”

“ The talk of patriotism and imperialism is a gigantic fraud, and the tyranny of it makes our names hated throughout the world. We have no right to enforce our sway upon the peace-loving farmers and the ignorant blacks of South Africa. They rightly hate us for it, and so do the millions [24] of India, upon whom our yoke is held by armies of soldiers who have to be maintained by their victims. It casts one down to think of it, just as the sight of those ridiculous rifle-butts and the thought of the diseased sentiment behind them depresses one. ”

“ You see John Crondall everywhere."
"He was dead against any sort of an Alliance while we were under a cloud. And he was right. The British people couldn't afford to enter any compact upon terms of less than perfect equality and independence. But now—why, Dick, it's a dream come true: the English-speaking peoples against the world. It's Imperial Federation founded on solid rock. No! With its roots in the beds of all the seven seas. And never a hint of condescension, but just an honourable pact between equals of one stock." ”

“ Why not the very soul of our part, Stairs—the essential first step toward our end? Our part is to urge a certain specific duty on them—a duty we reckon urgent and vital to the nation. But we can't do that unless we, or you, can first do your part—rousing them to the sense of duty—Duty itself. Man, but your part is the foundation of our part—foundation, walls, roof, corner-stone, complete! We only give the structure a name. Why, I give you my word, Stairs, that that address of yours on Tuesday was the finest piece of patriotic exhortation I ever listened to. ”

“ It is safe to say that every inch of General von Füchter's progress was mapped out in Berlin long months before it came to astound and horrify England. The maps and plans in the possession of the German staff were masterpieces of cartographical science and art. The German Army knew almost to a bale of hay what provender lay between London and the coast, and where it was stored; and certainly their knowledge of East Anglia far exceeded that of our own authorities. The world has never seen a quicker blow struck; it has seldom seen a blow so crushingly severe ”

“ In short, as time went on, I became as indifferent to ends and aims as the most callous among those at whose indifference to matters of real moment I had once girded so vehemently. And I lacked their excuse. I cut no figure at all in the race for money and pleasure; unless my clinging to Beatrice be accounted pursuit of pleasure. Certainly it lacked the rapt absorption which characterized the multitude really in the race. I fear I was rapidly degenerating into a common type of Fleet Street hack; into nothing more than Clement Blaine's assistant. ”

“ But the English purse is deep, and the Englishman has long years of money-spinning freedom from discipline behind him. Still, here is this brutal fact of the invasion. Here we are actually condemned to nine years of life inside a circle of German encampments on English soil, with a hundred millions a year of tribute to pay for the right to live in our own England. Now my notion is that the lesson must not be lost. The teaching of the thing must be forced home. It must be burnt into these happy-go-lucky countrymen of ours—if Stairs and Reynolds are to achieve their end, or we ours. ”

“ Oh, my dear friends, do please believe me, that, even apart from God's will and the all-sacrificing love of His Son, there is absolutely no real happiness in this world outside the clean, sweet way of Duty. If you profess you love a woman, but shirk your duty by her, of what worth is such love? Is God of less importance to you? Is Eternity of less importance? Are King and Country, and the future of our race and the millions who depend on us for light and guidance and protection, of less importance? ”

“ Thus I found myself confronted with a sufficiently serious situation for a young man whose training so far had no more fitted him for taking part in any particular division of the battle of life, where the prize sought is an income, than for the administration of the planet Mars. Rugby was better than some of the great public schools in this respect, for a lad with definite purposes and ambitions, but its curriculum had far less bearing upon the working life of the age than it had upon its games and pastimes and the affairs of nations and peoples long since passed away. ”

“ Even those who were honourable, disinterested, and, for such a period, unselfish, were for the most part the disciples of tradition and the slaves of that life-sapping curse of British politics: the party spirit, which led otherwise honourable men to oppose with all their strength the measures of their party opponents, even in the face of their country's dire need.
Then there was the anti-British faction, a party which spread fast-growing shoots from out the then Government's very heart and root. ”

“ Almost all the people with money had left the capital. Those remaining—the poor, the refugees from northward, irresponsibles, people without a stake of any kind; these desired but the one thing: food and safety. The German Commander-in-Chief was wise. He knew that if time had been allowed, resistance would have been organized, even though the British regular Army had, by continuous reductions in the name of "economy," practically ceased to exist as a striking force. And therefore time was the one thing he had been most determined to deny England. ”