THE HEATHEN MAKE MUCH ADO

Evening Star, Issue 23586, 27 May 1940, Page 6

THE HEATHEN MAKE MUCH ADO

The King, in his week-end broadcast to the nation, spoke King’s English—■ not King’s English in the narrow, linguistic sense (though that was included) but the sort of English in which wo would have a King, in all times of crisis, express the best and truest, most forthright and strongest sentiments of his subjects. He was replying to the Nazi misrepresentation of British Imperialism as something identical with a spirit of domination and lust of conquest. “ Wc, the free people of the Empire, cast that word back in their teeth. It is they who have these evil aspirations.” His Majesty recalled that the British Empire had always stood for peace, hut that peace had been denied to it in pursuance of a long-planned scheme directed against all the nations of the world. “ Against our honesty is set dishonour; against our faithfulness is set treachery; against our justice, brute force. There is the clear and unmistakable opposition which lies in the forces that now confront one another.” There was no doubt of the end. The King adjured his subjects, with trust in God, to put into their task, whatever it might be, all the courage and purpose of which they were capable. “ Keep your hearts proud and your resolve unshaken. Let us go forward to that task as one man, with a smile on our lips* our heads held high, and, with God’s help, we shall not fail.”

Plain words, uplifting words, without any bluster or rant. Even so Queen Elizabeth flung down her challenge to tyranny and spoke to enhearten her soldiers at Tilbury, when the Spanish Armada threatened England with just as acute a danger as it is facing to-day. The tradition endures of manners as well as spirit. Let us quote Queen Elizabeth on another occasion; ‘‘lt may bo thought simplicity in me, that all this time of my reign I have not sought to advance my territories and enlarge my dominions, for opportunity hath served me to do it. . . . My mind was never to invade my neighbours or to usurp over any.” Not so the enemies of that earlier time. Not eq the Germans of to-day. “ The heathen make much ado,” as the Psalmist said. Herr Dietrich, described as the German Press Chief, finds something too convincing in King George’s speech. A half-page of a Berlin newspaper is filled with rant by him to offset it. The immoral principles, he would have it, have been all on Great Britain’s side. Czocho-Slovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium might have something to say to that. It was not by British hordes that they were invaded. But the crime of Germany is more clear from the fact that she is performing it not for the first, hut, within a generation, for the second time. There is nothing new in it except one or two of the yeapons and a greater concentration,

following a more elaborate process of miseducation, given to the design. Read Kipling’s ‘ The Outlaws,’ written in 1914:

Through learned and laborious years They set themselves to find Fresh terrors and undreamed-of fears To heap upon mankind.

All that they drew from Heaven above Or digged from earth beneath, They laid into their treasure-trovo And arsenals of death:

While, for well-weighed advantage sake, Ruler and ruled alike Built up the faith they meant to break When the fit hour should strike.

They traded with the careless earth. And good return it gave; They plotted by their neighbour’s hearth The means to make him slave.

There were simple Britons who did not believe that in. 1914. There is no one in the world, except State-blinkered Germans, w r ho does not believe it today. while the real Nazis, apart from propaganda, gloat upon it. But the Empire that speaks still with the voice of all the past, and does more than speak, will bo equal to the need.