AN HONOURABLE REPROACH

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 28, 2 August 1923, Page 6

AN HONOURABLE REPROACH

M. Le Comte de Saint Aulaire, French Ambassador to the Court of St. James, no doubt meant it as 1 a compliment when he reminded the Friends of France that Britain was still a nation of shopkeepers. He was but repeating an old, and 'sometimes contemptuous, reproach, popularly attributed to Napoleon. True, .his Excellency added that if Britain was but a nation of shopkeepers, it always kept in stock those sometimes rare commodities to-day, honour and justice. But is it not time that the British should be regarded as something more than a nation of shopkeepers ? The appellation has never seriously been resented, because in large measure it is true that Great Britain is still the leading commercial nation in the world, and London is still the central point of the commerce and finance of the world. But surely the British are not all imbued with the instinct to keep shop, as so very many Continental people seem to think they are. In engineering, shipbuilding, chemistry, agricultural research, and stockbreeding the British continue to hold their own; in explorationarctic, antarctic, African, Asian, and Australian—they have done fairly well; they were the first landscape painters; and Elgar, an English musician, commands respect even in Germany, a nation of musicians; there have been a few really great British poets, and there are some British writers left, whose ! works are popular in France, notwithstanding the risks they run in translation. The influences of Darwin, Crookes, Dewar, Thompson, Rutherford, Almroth-Wright have left their mark upon the whole scientific world, and these men were not shopkeepers nor imbued with the spirit of shopkeeping. Of the sailors and soldiers recruited from this nation of shopkeepers let the French themselves speak, but whatever else these, were, they were brave and not devoid of honour and justice. The reproach of the British that they are a nation of shopkeepers is now as hopelessly out of date as it is inaccurate. His Excellency will not need to be reminded of the shopkeeper's" most recent honourable discharge of his obligations to the "United States