West of England

“ England is old and is, or presently will be, decadent. Her bigotry is that of age, her unprogressive slowness of change is senile. She has been the great colonizer; and in so far as the development of transportation facilities has brought her colonies closer home to her, it has given England hope—her only hope—that of existing in the future of her robust children. ”

“ From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England ”

“ The landscape is as unlike the finer parts of Old England as it is unlike the most carefully tended parts of New England. It has neither the intense green, the subdivisions in hedges, the bosky lanes, the picturesque cottages, the niceness of minute garden-culture, of England, nor the broken, mixed lawn gardening and neglected pastures and highways, with the sweet wild hills, of the Berkshire region. It is an open, elevated, rolling land, giving the traveller often the most extended views over wheat and clover, hemp and tobacco fields, forests and blue-grass pastures. ”

“ The map of Great Britain at the accession of William the Conqueror has the same three great divisions which exist to-day. The little kingdoms had disappeared and England extended north to the Tweed, which separated it, as it now does, from the kingdom of Scotland. On the west was Wales, inhabited then, as it is still, by descendants of the native Britons, of whom only a small remnant had survived the German invasions. The Danes had been absorbed into the mass of the population and all England recognized a single king. ”

“ The whole stretch is framed in with definite hills, the last and highly marked line of the Pennines bounds the view upon the east; upon the west the first of the Welsh hills stands sharply in a long even line against the fading sun; and on the north you see the height of Delamere. There are three other views in the North of England, the first easy, the last two difficult to obtain, all between them making up a true picture of what the North of England is. ”

“ One feels in its full extent that the nature of the country presents all the requisites for greatness to a powerful and undegenerate people; and one no longer requires an explanation why it was not till after a desperate struggle that the ancient Britons relinquished it, or why, in after times, various nations strove with their utmost efforts for the possession of such a land.
The farther one travels towards the north or west of England, the mountains become higher, the valleys narrower, and the streams more rapid. In the north, however, the mountains rather resemble high hills. ”

“ Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring this hinterland, England scarcely furnished a man ”

“ Who can observe without a feeling of sadness how the last feeble remnants of Scotland’s ancient masters, after having been expelled from the glorious Lowlands, cannot even now find rest among the barren rocks, and in the few arable valleys of the Highlands, but are obliged, year after year, in increasing numbers, to seek another home farther west, in the new world beyond the Atlantic? ”

“ A rich citizen in London, a gentleman of large fortune eastwards, has, perhaps, some very valuable relations or friends in the West. Half a dozen times in his lifetime he hears of their welfare by the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when the Western curate posts up to town to be initiated into a benefice—and that is all. ”

“ The West was a common meeting ground where men from New England, the Middle States, and the South Atlantic region constituted a varied population, representative of all the rest of the country, and dwelling together in so close a unity that each group adopted many of the ways and ideas of the other groups, and correspondingly modified its own. ”

“ To such base uses all things return at last; dust unto dust, when the life has died out of them, and the living world needs their companionship no longer.
On leaving Oxford, the visitors spread over England, north, south, east, and west. We trace Legh in rapid progress through Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Yorkshire, and Northumberland; Leyton through Middlesex, Kent, Sussex, Hants, Somersetshire, and Devon. ”

“ In the Norman expeditions the North, mighty in its heathenism, poured forth towards the east, the west, and the south, its numerous warriors and shrewd men, who subverted old kingdoms, and founded new and powerful ones in their place. It was by Danish and Norwegian fleets that Normandy and England were then conquered, and kingdoms won in Scotland, Ireland, and North Holland ”

“ The local rulers, instructed by their superiors, have long permitted even the licentiousness of the press. The strength of the empire justified and accounted for its tolerance. There is no tyranny so watchful as that of fear, and no cruelty so relentless as that of factions who struggle for existence.
The non-dependence of the government on the people has united the colonists in one body. It has been the colony against England, and not tories against whigs. ”

“ His rejoinder was felt with that bitterness which none can realise who have not known the tyranny of irresistible despotism. Happily for mankind there is no power above the steady and determined operations of truth and right. The cruel desertion of the people in the hour of their distress—the scornful defiance of their complaints, has involved the cabinet of England in difficulties for which nothing but great sacrifices will fully obviate. No people in this hemisphere will entirely trust a British minister until the history of Van Diemen's Land is forgotten. ”

“ It is one of the most striking phenomena of the day, the swift advance of the European countries in applying the resources of science to the advancement of technical education; and we cannot any more than England afford to be left behind in the competition and race for progress in this line. The Government must do what it can to support technical education; and technical education on its own behalf, even if there were no competition and no stress of necessity, has great and paramount claims to the support of the Government and the community itself. ”

“ For a word, or a look, the felon was brought to the triangle; but when he shot down the native, and acquired distinction by his butcheries, justice became scrupulous: the laws were silent—religion and humanity were silent; and the fallen black, like the uprooted forest, was thought of as an encumbrance removed!
The state of the census was equally reprehensible: England not only forgot the prescriptions of nature, and formed communities of men, but the inevitable consequence to the natives was utterly neglected. ”

“ England, in rearing such a community, is preparing not only conquerors of India, but enemies to herself and to all mankind. While on the one side the experiment of a reforming penal colony is, perhaps, the grandest ever tried in morals, it is one which is perfectly safe; for the settlement never can be worse than it is now, when no attempt towards reformation is dreamed of, and when it is governed on principles of political economy more barbarous than those which prevailed under Queen Bess. ”

“ Sometimes, as they looked out-of-doors over the burnt-up prairie round their new home, his father would tell him about the trim green fields they had left so far behind them, and say with a sigh, 'Old England was like a garden, but this place is nothing but a wilderness!'
Longview was the name of the lonely western village where George Wilson, his wife, and Jack had lived for eight years, and although we should not have thought it a particularly nice place, they were very happy there. ”

“ Gentlemen, at this late hour I will detain you no longer, but I will assure you that the deep interest which I have felt, and ever shall feel, in the progress of education in India makes me esteem very highly indeed the honour which you have conferred upon me to-day. My best wishes will ever accompany the onward progress of this University, which is doing in India for England work so noble, and is binding together the two lands and their numerous races with cords more powerful than the strength of armies and more enduring than the craft of Statesmen. ”

“ England and France were rivals, not only on the continent, but in the West Indies, in India, and in Europe. ”

“ Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilising conquests, civilising settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life! ”

“ It was the wish of the Tasmanian settlers to restore free trade between the colonies, and to impose discriminating duties on the produce of foreign countries; but the harsh and ridiculous system of colonial government, which discriminated between Australian and Canadian grain, compelled one British colony to treat another, its next neighbor, as an alien, and that while England demanded free admittance for English manufactures. ”

“ Do not think that all the danger lies in that bolted cloud which flashes in the Southern horizon. There is decay, and change, here in the North. Old New-England, that suckled American liberty, is now suckling wolves to devour it. ”

“ Love of gossip has ever been considered an essential characteristic of provincial society, and surely life in an up-country station in India is, Hiberuis ipsis Hibernior, still more devoid of topics of interest than the smallest village community in England, where every-day news is received from all parts of the world, and the newest books, pamphlets, and periodicals can be obtained almost as soon as published. It must not be supposed, however, that conversation is invariably of this trivial nature. Most men in India are well acquainted with the literature of the day, and many go much higher. ”

“ England is beautiful by copse and hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep, deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of northern France—though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it. Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery, have made England what she is—the garden of Europe. ”

“ Just as the untravelled heart of the Indian exile is over turning towards home, and even those who are supposed to be most devoted to the country and its pleasures (such as they are) never cease to look forward with impatient longing to the day when they may sit at the fondly-remembered hearth with those whom absence has but made dearer.
The views of politics taken in India are generally broader and more liberal than those one hears in England. ”

“ The population was sparse, ignorant, and unprosperous. It was in the south that improvements originated. In the reign of Henry VIII, the North fought against the dissolution of the monasteries (SS352, 357) ; in Elizabeth's reign it resisted Protestantism; in that of George I it sided with the so-called "Pretender" (S535) .
But steam transformed an immense area. Factories were built, population increased, cities sprang up, and wealth grew apace. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester, Sheffield, and Liverpool made the North a new country. (See Industrial Map of England, p.10.) ”

“ I know not how long my residing here may be useful to others, nor whom I may yet be able to reclaim, by shewing that I can bear injury and encounter opposition without renouncing my own principles, or calumniating my opponents; but this I know, I am labouring at my post like a faithful subject, and had all men done the same, our good King would not now have been seen snatching his meal under a hedge like a common mendicant, nor would the great seal of England have had to be secretly carried to him like the booty of a cut-purse. ”

“ NATURE OF SOUTH DOWNS them from the north, as so many do now, motoring and bicycling south from London, their steep, sharp face showing black with the daylight behind it, is the principal feature of the south-east of England. ”

“ I say the South is the enemy of the North. England is the rival of the North, a powerful rival, often dangerous; sometimes a mean and dishonourable rival. But the South is our foe,—far more dangerous, meaner, and more dishonourable. England keeps treaties ; the South breaks faith. ”

“ I considered it as a small point gained, to have a public building dedicated to religious purposes, whose spire should catch the eye, both of the wandering natives, and the stationary Colonists. It would have its effect on the population generally. The people of England look with a degree of veneration to the ancient tower and lofty spire of the Establishment ”

“ To them it seemed a toy landscape for children to play with, but, as they passed through the big towns and cities with their tall, clustering chimneys, their crowding populations, with unmistakable evidences of great wealth, their shipping, where the harbours bit into the red coast line, there began to waken in them the thought that this tiny England, so beautifully finished, and so neatly adorned, was something mightier than they had ever known. ”