136 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



"Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet, 

 The flower of England's chivalry? 

 Wild grasses are their Minding sheet, 

 ' And sobbing waves their threnody. 



"Peace, peace, we wrong our noble dead 

 To vex their solemn slumber so; 

 But childless and with thorn-crowned head, 

 Up the steep road must England go!" 



"We have here the same motive, the same lesson which Byron applies 



to Eome: 



"The Niobe of Nations — there she stands, 



Crownless and childless in her voiceless woe, 



An empty urn within her withered hands, 



Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago!" 



XXXIX. It suggests the inevitable end of all empire, of all do- 

 minion of man over man by force of arms. More than all who fall 

 in battle or are wasted in the camps, the nation misses the 'fair women 

 and brave men' who should have been the descendants of the strong 

 and the manly. If we may personify the spirit of the nation, it grieves 

 most not over its 'unreturning brave,' but over those who might have 

 been, but never were, and who, so long as history lasts, can never be. 



XL. Against this view is urged the statement that the soldier 

 is not the best, but the worst, product of the blood of the English 

 nation. Tommy Atkins comes from the streets, the wharves, the 

 graduate of the London slums, and if the empire is 'blue with his 

 bones,' it is, after all, to the gain of England that her better blood 

 is saved for home consumption, and that, as matters are, the wars of 

 England make no real drain of English blood. 



In so far as this is true, of course the present argument fails. If 

 war in England is a means of race improvement, the lesson I would read 

 does not apply to her. If England's best do not fall on the field of 

 battle, then we may not accuse war of their destruction. The fact 

 could be shown by statistics. If the men who have fallen in England's 

 wars, officers and soldiers, rank and file, are not on the whole fairly 

 representative of 'the flower of England's chivalry,' then fame has been 

 singularly given to deception. We have been told that the glories of 

 Blenheim, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Majuba Hill, were won by real Eng- 

 lishmen. And this in fact is the truth. In every nation of Europe the 

 men chosen for the army are above the average of their fellows. The 

 absolute best doubtless they are not; but still less are they the worst. 

 Doubtless, too, physical excellence is more considered than moral or 

 mental strength, and certainly again the more noble the cause, the 

 more worthy the class of men who will risk their lives for it. 



Not to confuse the point by modern instances, it is doubtless true 



