ENGLISH TRAITS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 25 July 1924, Page 3

ENGLISH TRAITS.

NHEIIITAXCEOF EVERY BRITISH CHILD'. One of Mr. Bald win's recent speeches "’ a s on the traits of the .Englishman. Hie occasion (The Times reports) was the annual festival dinner of the Royal Society of St. George. At this gathering men of the Coidstream Guards in the uniform of Cromwell’s Ironsides formed a guard of honour at the entrance to the hall, and the chairman * u d principal guests were preceded into the hall by a standard-bearer carrying x rose-decked banner of St. George. Drums and fifes played in ‘‘The Roast Beef of Old England.” According to Mr. Baldwin, the English as a nation grumble but do not worry. Thereby :hey keep their nervous systems sound and safe. The Englishman was made for times of crisis and emergency. He vas serene in difficulty. He might seem to be. indifferent when times were easy: he might not look ahead; he might not ieed warnings and lie might not prepare, but when he once started he was persistent to the death, and he was ruthless in action. In one passage Mr. daldwin, though he has disclaimed eloquence before now, rose to almost poetcal heights. It was the passage in .vhich he. explaimed his confession that ‘to him England was the country, and the country was England.” When he isked himself what he meant by England, there came to him through his arious senses the sounds and sights of England—the tinkle of the hammer’on the anvil in a country smithy, the corn•wake in the dewy morning', the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, 'lid the sight of a plough team eoming over the brow of a hill; the wild anemones in the woods in April, the last 'oad of hay being drawn down the lane n twilight, and most moving, the smell of the wood smoke going up in the i-utumn evening. Those things struck town to the very depth of our feelings. Those were the things that made England, and they ought to he the inheritance of every child horn into the country.