"GUARDIANS OF OUR COUNTRY"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 21, 25 January 1940, Page 10

"GUARDIANS OF OUR COUNTRY"

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—While the Rt. Hon Winston Churchill's power of inspiration for British people is as great as it is today, perhaps your readers will be in a better mood to profit by the following extract from his speech to the Royal Society of St. George, delivered on April 24, 1933:—

"Historians have noticed, all down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people which has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle. The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abase-ment into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a* vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias? i

"Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nations are every day asserting a' more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralysed by , our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final. Stripped of her Empire in the Orient, deprived of the sovereignty of the seas, loaded with debt and taxation, her commerce and carrying trade shot out by foreign tariffs and quotas, England would sink to the level of a fifth-rate Power, and nothing would remain of her glories except a population much larger than this island can support.

"Why should we break up the solid structure of British power, founded on so much health, kindliness, and freedom, for dreams which may some day come true, but are now only dreams, and some of them nightmares? We ought, as a nation and Empire, to weather any storm that blows as well as,any otWer existing system of human £oyerm£g{&, Kg &gp §i fiftgfi.moj&jgj.

perienced and more truly united than any people in the world. It may" well be that the most glorious chapters of cur history are yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake." I suggest, Sir, that no young man of spirit can read those words unmoved today.—l am, etc., C! Tl T\TTD"DT T71