Young England

“ That we may live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy and a privileged and prosperous People, is my prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the enemy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion. We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity. ”

“ Young people learn the history of England by reading small books which connect some memorable event that they can understand, and remember, with the name of each king—such as Tyrrell’s arrow-shot with William Rufus, or the wreck of the White Ship with Henry I. But when they begin to grow a little beyond these stories, it becomes difficult to find a history that will give details and enlarge their knowledge, without being too lengthy. ”

“ The customs and cares of civil life dishearten and depress, and a run on poetry would be proof of reawakened sensibility. Let us hope that England, where life has seemed both stablest and stalest, is to be refreshed by a wave of finer enthusiasm. The young will feel it first, for they are never stale or established. Of all the young men whom England has sent out to fight, he who has produced the best poem seems to have least hesitated, answering the call to fight with ecstatic joy. ”

“ Here, at all events, day after day went over that mysterious young head, filling it with impressions, not one of which ever seems to have escaped it, and preparing its tenant genius to be the great bridge between old and modern England, by means of which, feeling, as well as fact, runs on continuously, in the line of English History, and gives it a unity and a vitality which the annals of other nations lack. Oh, strange, immortal, universal Will! How supernatural the interest that hangs about thine every step, from the cradle to the grave. ”

“ Therefore these authors of our school textbooks felt that they needed to bolster our cause up for the benefit of the young. Accordingly our boys’ and girls’ sense of independence and patriotism must be nourished by making England out a far greater oppressor than ever she really had been. These historians dwelt as heavily as they could upon George III and his un-English autocracy, and as lightly as they could upon the English Pitt and upon all the English sympathy we had. ”

“ It is not so much the fault of England, as of yourself, that you do not feel settled and at home. You have now as good a position as a young man of intellect, and with a future before him, could possibly have anywhere, either in England or in Germany. ”

“ We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation that History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not in the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor the overthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be actors not in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner they are prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire will acquit itself. ”

“ The History of England, or, as the children call it, History, ignoring the fact that there is any other history than that of England, has hitherto been presented to young people as "outlines of dates and facts, or as collections of romantic stories, with little coherence and less result on the fortunes of the country." ”

“ With the true liberality of young England, which abides even now as large and glorious as ever, we always called the free and enlightened operatives of the period by the courteous name above set down, and it must be acknowledged that some of them deserved it, although perhaps they poached with less of science than their sons. ”

“ England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for an American to understand the spirit. ”

“ We are proud of the courage and the gaiety these little papers show. We laugh at their quips and jokes: then suddenly we find that the corners of our mouths are quivering [ix] and the tears are gathering in our eyes. We see that the boys are thinking about England below their gaiety. One young poet lifts the veil in this exquisite little rondeau—
“‘If we return, will England be
Just England still to you and me—
The place where we must earn our bread? ”

“ In England you have towns of 3000 people cut off from all high-roads, yet with clean inns, civil hosts, and a postchaise ready at a moment's notice. Young wishes to have both the energetic Government and the energy of private enterprise. He admires the great public works of France, but is stirred to wrath by the apathy of the individual Frenchman. ”

“ So, beyond the day when industry will be far more fruitful than at present, there will be another day and a better, when the race will be far stronger too.
Thus, as the young man's first object is to be free to go his own way, and his next is to earn for himself, and then to provide his own home, so it is with nations, or at any rate with England. In the seventeenth century she attained to freedom; in the eighteenth and nineteenth she addressed herself to industrialism; in the twentieth she will consummate these two achievements by establishing the family on the basis of health and strength. ”

“ It is a common complaint with the whole of a passing generation—the big manufacturers who built up England’s commercial supremacy, the veterans who remember the strenuous middle class existence of Victorian England—that the whole newer time thinks that it has little to do but to settle down and enjoy the heritage which has been won. The young men of the suburban society, especially, are being accused of a mere childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements. ”

“ It was from these colleges that so many strong-hearted young men went forth into political public life in England to act the scholar in politics, and who, as scholars in politics, enunciated those new principles and new theories of government which made Old England glorious for a time, and which made New England the power for good which she afterward became, first at her home in the old States, and in all their extension westward even to this hour. ”

“ Looking at England, however, as England was, the young King saw 'all things out of order.' 'Farming gentlemen and clerking knights,' neglecting their duties as overseers of the people, 'were exercising the gain of living.' 'They would have their twenty miles square of their own land or of their own farms.' Artificers and clothiers no longer worked honestly ”

“ The success with which we exert our influence upon distant peoples will depend upon what manner of young men we train up to carry it among them. If the graduates of German institutions are prepared to establish their civilization in the imperial colonies, the fact has not yet been shown. The colleges of England have manned the British Empire. ”

“ The conduct of these young Englishmen under such trying circumstances has been praised by almost every political writer who took an interest in the subject, and there seemed only one opinion throughout the country, that their coolness, courage, and endurance, under great difficulties and personal dangers, could not have been surpassed by the bravest and most experienced men. ”

“ The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no further back than the contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. England can show now, as she has been able to show in every generation since civilization spread over the West, individual men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of her intellectual eminence. ”

“ There he had heard her story from the time the Sicilian countess came as a bride to England—the whole story, with its tragedies and bitterness, told with the solemn, dramatic, yet compassionate words of an old, wise man who knew the hearts of men and of women. ”

“ In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom. ”

“ Only a few more remain to be unclosed, and we shall behold the consummate flower of fourteen centuries;—centuries in which the most practical nation in the world has steadily pursued an ideal! The ideal of individual freedom subordinated only to the good of the whole.
The triumph of England has been the triumph not of genius, nor of intellect, but of character. It is those cross-threads of stubborn homely traits, the tenacity of purpose, the reluctance to change, the adherence to habit, usage and tradition, which have toughened the fabric almost to indestructibility. ”

“ But that supremacy, yielding to that mysterious law which has impelled the march of empires westward, is passing from her to another nation and another people; which people and nation, I need scarcely tell you, are ourselves. England, like all nations that have preceded her, has had her day: her destiny is nearly completed, her mission is drawing to a close, her work is done. And, under the providence of God, she has done much good, if she has done much evil. The world owes her much, and will owe her much more ”

“ To the contemplative stranger who permits himself not only to talk sentimental nonsense, but to think it, it seems as if, somehow, all England had been gathered up into such a place—-as if nothing less than her glorious past, her wealth, her power, her honour, her uninvaded centuries, had been needed to produce it. ”

“ The nobility, the clergy, the gentry, the literati, the professional classes, and then the people—after all, in England they are one; “shade unperceived and softening into shade,” and joined and knit together by habits, tastes, alliances, and interests, in a wonderful order. Much yet remains to be done, and will be done, to smooth down remaining asperities between rank and rank; but the British aristocracy may be said, even now, to be a genuine one, identified with everything great and good in the nation, and, on the whole, presenting a wholesome example to other classes in the State. ”

“ How admirable are the care, the energy, and the perseverance with which Nature works, through centuries, at the formation of the nations which she has destined to civilise certain territories! We have here an example with which it is impossible not to be struck. In the designs of God, in the progress of the human race, it is written that England shall play a great part in the development of Western civilisation. For this purpose a people must be formed—I was going to say, must be wrought—whose powerful constitution shall be capable of fulfilling the great task. ”

“ The period occupied by what we speak of as English history is that, speaking broadly, during which the great mediæval systems—feudalism and the Church—have by degrees given place to modern society, of which the moving-springs are freedom of the individual, government in accordance with the popular will, and freedom of thought. The object of a History of England is therefore to trace that change as it worked itself out amid all the various influences which affected it in our own nation. ”

“ You remember that William I conquered England in 1066—eight hundred years ago. Well, from the time that he and his followers came to this country the English race has been gradually growing into the nation to which we belong and into the sort of people we see round us every day. Even the very poorest English children nowadays go to school and can read and write. Children whose parents are not so poor learn much besides reading and writing, and thousands of the sons and daughters of rich or fairly well-to-do people go to college, and spend years of their life in study. ”

“ English scholars thronged the foreign universities; English chroniclers questioned travellers, scholars, ambassadors, as to what was passing abroad.' The influence of English learning and English statecraft made itself felt all over Europe. Never, perhaps, in all the history of England was there a time when Englishmen played so great a part abroad." The king who gathered this wide, incongruous empire under his sceptre, by mere circumstances of birth and marriage, proved strangely equal, in many respects, to its greatness. ”

“ If we know the importance of our aim, if we but will to act upon our knowledge, surely we can accomplish what chance apparently enabled our forefathers to accomplish. Imperial England of the sixteenth century preserved for later ages shapes and visions that greet us from out the oldest wonder-world of Celts and Teutons; may not imperial Britain of our days seek from the lips of passing races, before they have wholly passed away, sustenance and embodiment for the creation of new types of significance and beauty? ”

“ And yet—the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months—an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written. ”

“ We are brought to weigh one generation against another, to reckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. What lies before us in the next decades? Is England going on to fresh achievements, to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she falling into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?
The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have we pride enough to attempt still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom and the quality? ”