EMPIRE BUILDERS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3808, 14 September 1936, Page 6

EMPIRE BUILDERS

BLACKGUARDING THEM CONDEMNED. SHEER IGNORANCE THAT SWAGGERS. (By “Old Stager” in Brisbane Mail.) In days of free education and free libraries there is no valid excuse for abject ignorance. Unless, of course, boorish indifference, combined with supine mental laziness, counts as adequate apology for neglecting the abundant harvest that scholarship places within easy reach. The family Bible is not so fashionable in many homes as it used to be, perhaps, yet the parable of the buried talents still holds good to-day. If sedulous ignorance deserves the whip, what scorpions are its due reward when, so far from hiding its diminished head, it actually struts with a brazen swagger? The very least that an ignoramus can do is to assume a certain modesty. To flaunt the dunce’s cap with truculent panache is surely to invite the thunderbolts of righteous chastisement. This intolerable attitude is particularly noticeable amongst those people of more than one l political complexion, who like to think their outlook is “advanced.” With the overwhelming and irrefutable evidence available that the first Lord Oxford and Asquith collated as to Germany’s responsibility for the tragedy of the Great War, backed by the latest symptoms of Nazi mentality and Krupp Kultur, such people still persist in asserting that 1914-18 was a senile plot against youth, in which all European statesmen about equally shared, and that the devoted heroism that warded off that attempt to Prussianise Europe, and make free peoples perform the goose step, was a stupid futility. Such benighted ignorance, even of the affairs of yesterday, prepares us for still profounder ignorance of the vital history of past centuries. MUCH MALIGNED. One of the favourite theories now exploited, in fashionable drawingrooms, as well as from street-corner soap boxes, is that the illustrious ana far-seeing men who built up the British Empire were a pack of criminal thugs and homicidal crooks. To listen to these facile traducers of great and splendid ancestors of ours, whose boots they are not fit to lick, let alone clean, it, might be imagined that our majestic Imperial Commonwealth/ at this moment the world’s best hope in freedom’s mortal struggle, with ruthlessly armed oppression and open tyrrany, owed its existence to a sort of sixteenth-cen-tury wholesale smash-and-grab enterprise. One gentleman, a Right Honourable ornament of the front bench in our Imperial House of Commons, tells us “the foundations of the Empire were laid in wholesale plunder, theft, exploitation and murder ” 1 Whenever some self-advertised ignoramus gets up bn his or her hindlegs, and talks this sort of, drivelling bilge, there is always a crowd of mutton-heads ready to swallow the complete lie, and reward its author with the flattering unction of their idiotic cheers. Though it does not excuse such encyclopaedic ignorance of historical facts, our board school educator system perhaps in part explains it. We are too busy teaching our proletarian youth all manner of useless fancy work to have time to ground them in the authentic story of their own Imperial inheritance. Whilst the youth of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and also of Soviet Russia is elaborately drilled in the blessings of tyrannical absolutism and ruthless force majeure, our young people are not even taught the advantages of a free democracy, nor its patriotic obligations, nor told the true epic of our glorious past. DESPOTISM OF SPAIN. If our modern education system were worth its salt, the orator who emitted such sentiments as I have just quoted would be kicked off his platform, and pelted with the garbage of the nearest dust bin. Those glib malingerers of illustrious shades, who talk of the great Elizabethan captains as grabbing buccaneers and high sea robbers, completely ignore, if they ever knew, facts that history trumpets down the ages. Not only do they utterly fail to appreciate the contrast between the political and social setting of centuries far removed from each other, so that they apply the same conventional tape measure to the 16th and 17th as to the 20th century, but they completely ignore the grim struggle waged by those stout-hearted ancestors of ours against the cruel despotism of Spain and the Inquisition. It is almost eomic to reflect how, in sheer ignorance, the self-elected apostles of democratic liberty in 1936 libel its heroic champions of 1588. It was that incomparable genius Sir Walter Raleigh, who laid the foundations of the present Imperial Commonwealth. “Tell the Queen,” wrote this scholarly and chivalrous English captain of illustrious memory, when he was a prisoner in the Tower, but still dreaming of West-

wai’d Ho adventure, “I will give her an Empire greater than the King of Spain hath any.” Are we to compare the stature of Raleigh and his great English compeers, with that of any mediocrity now warming the sea-green cushions of the House of Commons? I find it rather a long way, and a steep descent, from Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins to any of our' up-to-date little politicians. Clive, with all his faults, seems to tower gigantically even above our most advanced poli-. tical intellectuals. There is a whole host of shining names that might be quoted, who played their splendid part as pioneers of the British Empire. What would this small island off the coast of Western Europe be to-day, or count for in the comity of nations but for the heritage they gave us ? FILTH RECOILS. Anyone might suppose, to listen to these ignoble moderns, who like illbred urchins pelt with mud the statues of the Great, that the AngloSaxon tradition had achieved nothing for humanity. Our crusade against slavery the world over, waged with no selfish object, will bear looking into with the minutest scrutiny. So will our pacifying and liberty-as-serting mission in India and in the Sudan. Even our most model and “advanced” politicians of to-day might shrink from judging their own achievements and ambitions by a standard of human perfection. They have been not invariably infallible, not always quite above suspicion, even in their own puny tinkerings with policy and affairs. The statesmanship and the bold enterprise that founded the British Empire as a far-flung citadel of freedom and well-ordered peace, whether these modern traducers realise it or not, is beyond the reach of their insults. They aim too high in their ambitious mud-slinging. The filth recoils. But apart from its exhibition of blatant ignorance, this passion for defiling our Imperial past betrays a strange incapacity to grasp the outstanding lessons of the immediate present. Whatever the hope of the future, for those traditions of democracy and liberty which the An-glo-Saxon peoples share in common and possess almost as a monopoly, assuredly it does not lie in Little Englandism. It is queer that some Socialist leaders, so far as they at the moment reveal themselves one feels there must surely be better material somewhere in reserve-—should insist on putting on the outworn garments ‘ that Liberalism long ago discarded. As we glance around and ahead today in this embittered and dangerous world the one solid fact that impresses sane Britons is the vital necessity that the British Commonwealth should hold firmly together against the coming tempest. Britons across the seas are not ashamed of their origins. It may be doubted whether they appreciate the efforts of the homeland mud-slingers. They know that the Empire was not built on soap-box oratory. It is time we at home realised that soap-box oratory will not maintain it.