"TWELVE O'CLOCK"

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 30, 3 August 1940, Page 10

"TWELVE O'CLOCK"

The following editorial appeared in the "New York Times" on July 24. "It is twelve o'clock in London. Hitler has spoken and Lord Halifax has replied. There is no more to be said. ■ "Or is there? Is the tongue of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of the King James translation of the Scriptures, of Keats, of Shelly, to be hereafter,,.-in tne British., Isles, .Hie dialect "of an enslaved race? "Let us try to see clearly. We have to look back a good many centuries to find - the beginnings of English liberty. We see it as a rough and obstinate growth, heaving the rich soil under the oaks of lordly estates, breaking out in Wat Tyler's time and in Cromwell's, and, in the day of the second James, forcing through the i Reform Acts, never perfected, never giving up. "We see the spread of democracy and of empire, side by side, confused and turbulent. "But we see democracy ever marching on. . "It is twelve o'clock in London; Not twelve o'clock for empire—there is no empire any more. "Not twelve o'clock for the old 'dominion over palm and pine.' Twelve o'clock "for the common people of England, out of whom England's greatest souls have always come, twelve o'clock for all that they are and have been, for all those things which make i life worth living for free men. "Twelve o'clock—and the wisest prophet in Christendom cannot say what is to come. The old, old towns of Britain, the hills and cliffs and shores and meadows rich with history, the homes and lives of forty-five million people, the great British traditions of human worth and dignity, the folk sayings, the deep wisdom and long-suffering hopes of a race—these, not being pleasing to Hitler, *^re condemned. ~ ■■ ■ , i "We know little and for a time shall know little of this unparalleled spectacle of the nation rising, as by a single impulse, to defend this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. From our own shores we cannot see the shadow over ancient gardens, over houses hoary with age, over the graves of poets and philosophers and the tombs of martyrs. . • "We know only that one of the green and lovely oases of civilisation in the wilderness of man's time on earth is foully threatened, and that the whole world for evermore will be poorer if it falls. "Words falter. There' are no phrases for the obscure ambition that attacks, for the magnificent mobilisation of a people that defends, unshaken and unafraid. "We can only pray that soon the time will come when the vultures no longer defile the British skies and the cry goes out from John o' Groat's to Land's End: 'Twelve o'clock and all's well.'"