OUR ENGLAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1942, Page 4

OUR ENGLAND

THINGS WORTH PRESERVING. It is the fashion of some popular publicists to tell us with a sort of exultation that “pre-war England is dead.” Surely such talk is dangerously superficial, says Professor Gilbert Murray, writing in the “Contemporary Review.” What country are we defending? Pre-war England was the only England we knew, the only England that existed, when England rose up against fearful odds to fight for the freedom of mankind and her own continuance. Of course there are changes; change is an element in life; but that spirit must not change. No doubt we shall all lose much of our daily liberty as regulations and controls increase. We shall all lose much of our comfort in the spread of impoverishment until the immense increase in man’s powers of production intervenes with its countervailing effect. We may lose much of our culture through the crippling of the educated middle class. But there is an English courage, an English standard of honesty in public affairs, of good-tempered discussion at home and freedom from intrigue abroad, a fidelity to that combination of idealism and commonsense, miscalled hypocrisy by those who are strange to it, which we may well hope to see preserved as strongly in the new England as in the old. I have little right to speak as a historian, but I certainly should find it hard to name any previous civilisation better worth preserving and developing on its own lines of progress than the England of the last hundred years. I like to think of the place that may lie before her among the liberated people of Europe, if once that brilliant and disastrous continent, which has seldom lived for ten continuous years free from war or pestilence, can be healed of its wounds in a period of lasting peace.