ENGLAND’S TO-MORROW.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3379, 20 June 1927, Page 2

ENGLAND’S TO-MORROW.

(By Sir Francis Younghusband, K.C.5.1., D.Sc., F.R.G.S.) To-day is St. George’s Day; it is also Shakespeare’s birthday and the ninth anniversary of the epic naval attack on Zeebrugge. In this article Sir Francis Younghusband-, one of the most distinguished English soldiers and travellers, discusses in characteristically vigorous fashion t the future of the Mother Country.

We English are accustomed to think ourselves old. We put on airs of great age. And this leads us to think we have had our day. In reality w© are in the first flush of young and vigorous manhood. Our great days are to come. India and China are old countries, and, naturally, look to their past. We have still to look to the future. That future we shall have to make for ourselves —and make glorious. To make it glorious we shall need all the manhood in us.

First, we are the centre, the heart, the focussing point of the British Empire. We have just acknowledged the full equality of status of the Dominions. We have stated our aim to be to enable India to fit herself for a like position. Doubtless, in the centuries to come, Canada and Australia will have developed, until they resemble the United States of to-day. India, too, will have achieved her Dominion status like them.

Nevertheless, England should always be able to maintain her position as the head and heart of the Empire. Grumbling, rivalries, jealousies there may be among the members of the Empire. But England, with her variety of experience and her prestige, as well as by the affection she ought to be able to inspire in those she has tended and nurtured in their years of growth, should have every part of the Empire homing to her. She ought to be the spiritual centre of the whole. The British Empire, with England as its head, is now tight set in the midst of the great community of nations. The days of splendid isolation are over. We are right in the thick of things. And things will get thicker. Rivalries will intensify, competition will become still more keen. Here in the centre of the contest we English shall find our real selves, and be able to play a part worthy of us and fitting to our nature. For we are not a decadent race, as we are for ever and so absurdly proclaiming ourselves. We are an exceedingly virile race. The English breed of men and women, like the English breed of other animals, is exceedingly hard to beat. We have some exasperating qualities we must admit. Foreigners still think us hypocritical” self-centred, self-satis-fied, self-righteous, and smug. W© have—or had —a rough side, too. A nasty, coarse, and brutal side. But let us hope that the tires of war have purged us of this worst part. To counteract it we have other qualities which must prove of priceless value in the rough and tumble of world affairs. Orderliness is natural to Englishmen. Foreign revolutionaries sneer at it, calling it docility. But it is the hall-mark of civilisation. Englishmen are orderly because they are civilised, And with Englishmen's orderliness goes his capacity for exercising his authority. A policeman seen exercising his authority in London rejoices the heart of every Englishman returning to his native land.

Loyalty is another trait of which we are entitled to he proud. Whatever may be said about the rights and wrongs of the case, no one can deny the loyalty with which the miners stood by each other during the coal strike. The instinct for leadership also we possess as a people. It returns much development, but it is here. It only needs that the leaders should be men worthy of the loyalty of their followers and be ready to make way the moment their capacity to serve is exhausted ; and that the followers, in addition to loyalty, should have the courage and wisdom to remove their leaders as soon as their leadership weakens or wavers. With these qualities we ought to be able to play a worthy part in world affairs, to make even the strongest see that our friendship is worth having, and that it is folly to provoke us; and so to conduct ourselves that all would acknowledge that we had the good of I the whole community of nations at heart.

The German nation is now realising that the great mistake it made before the war was in not securing our friendship. But the Russians, intent on a world revolution which would place all nations under the dictatorship of the proletariat, are, both in Europe and Asia, running directly athwart the line of world development on which we ourselves are working. For the immediate present, therefore, our most urgent duty is to withstand them and what they represent. We will not have any one class of our own or any other nation dictating to us.

And when w© have withstood Bolshevism and all that it means: \and when we have proved our staunchness with those who desire our friendship, our way will be clear for that glorious future which our glorious past demands that we shall secure.