A SERB’S TRIBUTE TO ENGLAND.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144779, 8 September 1915, Page 6

A SERB’S TRIBUTE TO ENGLAND.

AN INTERESTING STATEMENT. “The following eloquent tribute to England, moving in its expression of the deep faith which the smaller nationalities have in our country, and inspiring in its incentive to act in tho present according to the traditions of a great past, is from the pen of a Serbian writer, M. Lazare Kossovac, and has been contributed to the official Serbian journal, Saroouprava.” says' the Times. “Tho English people aro silent: but it remarkable that when there Northern men begin to speak they are raoro eloquent that we of the south. More eloquent is Macaulay than Mira beau, and Carlyle than Renan, and Gladstone than Mazzini.

“Englishmen are silent and thoughtful. Never was this island more silent, more thoughtful, or more busy than it is now. - The war has given to the whole of Great Britain a solemn aspect. As I stopped upon British soil at Folkestone, I foit ns though I had entered Westminster Abbey. A 1 this island is transformed into an abbey; every man is silent, thoughtful and busy. “In the Dardanelles five groat battleships have gone down. In tho southern lands such fosses would cause countless comments; but they cause Englishmen to become’only more silent, thoughtful, and busy. In the Atlantic there was committed tho ‘Suncrman’ crime of tho Lusitania, which like some vast sarcophagus was laid in the floor of the deep. Luc in England, as the news arrives, lips are on.y pressed more tightly, the brain is more intensely concentrated, and tasks aro more bravely seized. Zeppelins make daily competition with their brothers the submarines in the destruction of private property and of unarmed and innocent people. At homo, poisonous bombs may fall from airships, while poisonous gases choke the heroic men in the trenches. Day by day appear the long columns of killed and wounded. ’But the granite island is silent, thoughtful and busy! Thus it makes answer to all calamity. , “The English have to-day a veritable sea dominion from Role to Pole. If their duty to tho Allies was to tree the waters, they have done that duty brilliantly. To-day a Serbian can embark at Salonika and travel through Suez to the Antipodes, around tho globe and back through Gibraltar to Salonika again. During the whole journey he will travel upon tho friendly- English green sea-ficlds. English power upon the waters was never realised in such measure—and so effectively—as now. Never was there in history upon land such power as the English aro exercising now upon the seas. You will say, ‘Tile waters are only a highway, nothing more.’ No, the waters aro more than a highway. They represent ninetenths of tho best strategic positions, which, thanks to those Britons, are now in our possession; but which, without these Britons, had certainly been in German hands. “A free highway of the sea preserves the Allies from starvation, makes possible the transport of men and munitions, and transforms what would be otherwise widely-scattered parte into a well-knit and inseparable whole: Imagine if it were not so; imagine if the Germans had such dominion on the waters! Their battleships would now be at Salonika, Kronstadt, Vladivostok, at Naples, Marseilles, and Odessa, at Jaffa, and Bombay. Then, from all these sides would creep ihe German hosts; and who knows how many tribes and nations would not now be fighting against us on the Prussian side? It is, indeed, our happiness that these nine-tenths of the host strategic positions the English aro holding now and not the Germans. . . . “Upon this lofty rock stands a nation as one man and as if placed by Providence as sentinel to view with watchful eye every corner of our planet, and every movement of nearly two milliard of human beings of all races, all religions, and all States.”