234 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



our history incidents which would bring a blush, nor to discover 

 shrewdness in poHtics and commerce which has had self-interest 

 as its mainspring. The Englishman also makes professions of mor- 

 ality and religion which he embodies in conventional conduct, formally 

 observed codes of ethics and cramping institutions. But no one has 

 been harder upon the Englishman than himself. Thackeray and 

 Dickens were scathing critics of practices and characters of their day, 

 none more so, but who will deny that the resultant impression from 

 the work of these novelists is that England is sound and loveable, full 

 of natural and developed goodness ? One reason for the charge of 

 hypocrisy is that the Englishman does profess to follow ideals. The 

 public has its standards of conduct which count for much, because 

 the average person in his free life is constrained by his desire for 

 respectability to conform himself to them. But surely it is well to 

 profess moral standards and to attempt to follow them. They keep 

 back people from being shameless in misdeeds. As the voice of con- 

 science rises in a man against his worse self, so in the English public 

 these ideals find a response, and frequent criticism without fear of 

 consequences acts as a sharp salt to prevent morals from festering. 

 From the mixture of ideals and criticism, conventionality and freedom, 

 Puritanism and worldliness, which have so often been molten together 

 in the furnace of national distress, there has issued a spirit which 

 cools usually into steel of fine temper. 



To understand the Briton we must go far back, for his civilisation 

 is only less ancient than that of France. His heroes are Arthur, 

 Alfred, Henry V, Sir Philip Sidney, Cromwell, Chatham, Wolfe, 

 Nelson. The explorers of Britain from Drake to Livingstone and 

 Scott, who with his company perished at the South Pole, have dis- 

 played daring and resolution but have practised little cruelty. Rough 

 though the game often was they have in general played it according 

 to the rules, and many of them were "very gallant gentlemen." 



Britain has sent forth great pro-consuls, Durham, Sydenham 

 and Elgin to Canada; Dalhousie and the Lawrences to India; Cromer 

 to Egypt. She has had a line of judges befitting a people who more 

 than any other since the era of imperial Rome have been imbued with 

 a sense of law and order, a respect based not upon any abstract idea, 

 but on a deeply ingrained conservative instinct which almost uncon- 

 sciously turns to the supernatural for its sanction. 



But in her incomparable literature Britain's soul is best revealed 

 — in the Bible, which has been so long read by the people in their 

 own tongue that they accept it as theirs, in Chaucer, Shakespeare, 

 Milton, Wordsworth, Burke, Bright — in the stories that the children 



