THE REAL BRITAIN.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11115, 3 December 1914, Page 6

THE REAL BRITAIN.

MISCALCULATIONS. [By Arthur Mason]. London, Oc. 9. A prominent New York journal has been finding the war at its most extraordinary where it has shown Britain to be still a great nation, puissant, vigorous, all-sufficing. The spectacle of Britain rising mightily to the demands of these weeks is, it thinks, an unparalleled revelation. The impression was held that she would always do hexbest. But her best has proved to be a universal astonishment. No doubt that journal voices a widespread American feeling. No donbt, also, it is a feeling which other peoples shared with the Americans. Quite a number of folk, indeed, seem to have been thinking that this old country was an exploded superstition. Either it had grown flaccid and feeble, or it was complacently asleep under the weight of its prodigious past. In any case, it was a back number. The young, virile, energetic nations especially bad begun to despise the old land, which was the source of all their impetus. They were feverishly out in pursuit of their multitudious aims. She had achieved hers. Apparently, she was content now to watch, lazily amused, the children’s struggle for what they thought worth while. And from time to time that amiable senility was varied by activities still more senile —such as a pother about Ireland, and a ludicrous commotion over militant feminism. In the things chat really mattered —so they could clearly see —Britain was stale, effete, outborn. In a world of hustle her business methods had become a drag. Somehow her totals of wealth annually accumulated and annually expended remained huge; but that was merely a matter of momentum from the past. The British business man was slowly but surely fading out. Deplorably enough, too, he insisted on fading out. Everywhere people were teaching him the 'better way. Always he went undisturbed upon his own. He was hopeless. In other regards than that of money making further, the British nation was no less hopeless. It was lost in luxury. It was sunk in squalor. Its upper class was both selfish and decadent. Its middle class was either gorged with prosperity or avaricious of everything it lacked. Its masses, in the lowest depths of degradation, blinked sullenly at the life that was beyond them. British institutions were toppling to their fall. The Church was a vacant husk. The state was a moth-eaten cloak for ceremonial rags. Politicians abounded, statesmanship had vanished, the placemen took the spoils. As for the people, when they were not obtusely gropiug a to wealth, they were dully inert, or they were pitifully given over to childish sports and games. Across the thousand storied banners of the nation Icbabod was already written. The national spirit was withered and shrivelled. The lion heart of other days would beat no more. In some such sort, at any rate, was this poor old country visioned by the briskly vigorous young world outside. Then came the war—and when Great Britain shook hereslf and stood up, the world outside looked and was amazed at what it saw. “a revelation,” it cries—and a revelation it undoubtedly is, for all who had the seeming Britain to be the real Britain.

For them, mieed, this sudden uplift of the nation to giant stature must have all the astonishment of miracle. They had looked to find sloth and slackness and incapacity, and they see those apparent characteristics vanished utterly, as though they had never been. In place of them they find pride of race, patriotism, energy, soreness, swiftness, strength. Not one of the great national virtues but is easily and miraculously visible. The grandeur of a supreme occasion suffuses the whole people. Men appear suddenly, equipped for great places. Other men lift effortlessly to terrible heights of fame. Without haste, almost without sound, the whole vast machinery of war is set In motion. Calmly, with infinite order, and without hint of uncertainty, a peace-loving nation transforms itself for service of battle. The illusions of years are dispelled in an hour. The curled darling of the Fall Mall and Piccadilly Clubs marches out by the hundred at the head of his regiment, a strong brave man. The smugly prosperous suburban, the vacantly listless clerk, the grossly material working man, the low-down hooligan of the slums, rush by the hundred thousand to enlist, souls aflame. Tommy Atkins swings cut of barracks, and goes whistling to France, a great, and unriyalled soldier. Men of wealth and leisure, men of means, men merely of working capacity, join hands for the common cause. Money flows in an exhaustless stream. Workers are legion. Politics fall into discredit, and party wranglings are silenced. Everywhere the nation rings as true as it ever rang even in its mightiest past, and more than ever before, and with shattering effect, upou these who knew so little, and professed too know so much, men by the thousand rise up from the ends of the earth to demand a share in the honour of the flag they serve. The outside world is not wholly responsible for the error of judgment which mistook the seeming lor the real. Within her own borders men of her own race have discredited Britain before the world —men who not only cried peace when there' was no peace, but did their worst against the nation’s chance of rising to the needs of war. If they had not been listened to, there would have been such a British army in the field to day as would have spoiled the spoiler of Belgium and saved incalculable misery. If they had been listened to, as they clamoured to be the preparedness of the navy tor a l.fe aud-death gapple would have been as the uuprepareduess of the army. They are si til vocal, and. in places which were wont to give them voice. Even now they cry, through their spineless press, a meanspirited sentimentalism. God be thanked,- the Euglisnmen of this kidney were fouud out in time. If they had not been fennel cut, they would have drugged the spirit of Britain until awakening was impossible. As it is, and in despite of all the fools and blind, whose peace protestations for thirty years past Have played straight into German’s hands—Britain is awake. And the spectacle of Britain awake is just as the American journal describes it —a revelation.