Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



53 



BRITISH MAGNANIMITY. 

 A VERY interesting study of patriotism in England 

 and .\merica is contributed by Sydney Brooks to the 

 f December Foi-um. Mr. Brooks calls attention to the 

 feet that though we have more history than most 

 nations, if not any, we are as a people singularly 

 •deficient in the sense and pride of history. Com- 

 pared with our own kinsmen in Wales, Scotland, Ire- 

 land, and America, Englishmen have ne.\t to no 

 memory for the past at all. In France the organised 

 teaching of citizenship obtains throughout. In Ger- 

 many history and patriotism are taught together. But 

 " the nation on whose shoulders lie the heaviest 

 responsibilities that any people have yet borne makes 

 little or no attempt to equip her sons for the task of 

 discharging them intelligently." 



A PEOPLE WITHOUT A MEMORY. 



To the great masses of Englishmen parades and 

 processions and memorial exercises in honour, say, 

 of Waterloo, would seem a foolish waste of time. 

 " There is nothing that separates England and 

 America or England and Ireland so much as the 

 fact that the Americans and Irish have memories and 

 the English have none." If America owned the 

 British Empire she would make life one perpetual 

 round of public festivities. We should have a 

 Canada Day and an Australia Day, and a Day for 

 every other part of the Empire. We should live 

 over again our past through the calendar of an 

 Imperial year. 



CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH OF JULV. 



On the other hand, this lack of historical imagina- 

 tion and enlightened patriotism helps the English 

 to rob the past of all its sting. " No nation is so 

 incapable as the English of keeping a grudge alive. 

 No nation wa.stes so little of its time nourishing 

 futile antipathies." Mr. Brooks is especially im- 

 pressed by the way Englishmen celebrate the Fourth 

 of July. He says : — 



Of all the celebrations of the day and the event that the 

 past century and a quarter have witnessed, the most interesting, 

 ' , to my minil, was the first that was ever held in England. I do 

 not know the date, nor who had the hardihood to suggest it, 

 nor how the occasion was looked upon by current Knglish 

 •pinion. f!ut from that beginning much has sprung ; July the 

 I'ourlh has l>ecomc an Anglo-.Amcric.in festivity ; and the 

 Knglish, who never commemorate the triumphs of their history, 

 make an annual point of joining with ihe .\mcricans in cele- 

 brating its greatest disaster. 



Mr. Brooks will be interested to know that the first 

 of the present succession of English celebrations of the 

 Fourth of July took place in Browning Hall in 1895, 

 at which Mr. W. T. .Stead presided, Miss Willard 

 s])oke, and letters were read from the American 

 .Ambassador and from the Imperial High Commis- 

 sioner of Canada. Next year, for the first time in 

 history, a British statesman, Mr. James Bryce, was 

 invited to the American banquet. Since then the 



Fourth of July has become a British festival. Mr. 

 Brooks remarks : — 



There is, as it seems to me, something fine in a people who 

 can thus candidly publish and acknowledge the most appalling 

 and costly error in llitir annals. Which at any rale is the 

 more inspiriting figure of the two — an Englishman sincerely 

 and unreservedly honouring Washington, or an .\mencan 

 raking among the dust-heap of the Revolution for his Anglo- 

 phobiac fuel ? 



ANTI-ENGI,ISH FEELING IN U.S.A. - 



In the January London Miss M. S. Burton en- 

 larges on the carefully-cultivated antipathy of the 

 Northerners of the United States to this country. She 

 denounces their narrow vision, jaundiced by fancied 

 wrongs, which is called patriotism. She says : — 



That vision has created Sons and Daughters of the Revolu- 

 tion, great organisations throughout the country, whose function 

 it is to keep alive the popular version of the struggle for liberty, 

 by making speeches on Independence Day vivid with word- 

 pictures of the brutal tyranny of the English rule, and the 

 sublime efibrts their heroic forefathers made to break the hated 

 chains ; and how the god of victories upheld their righteous 

 cause till the struggle gave them freedom and laid the founda- 

 tion of their magnificent Republic. Let them never forget that 

 struggle, or the wicked oppression of the English which led to it. 

 Children are taught that it is a proof of patriotism to hoot the 

 Union Jack, and even to trample upon it when there is an 

 opportunity. Wherever it is possible in a childish way to llout 

 England by gibe and sneer the Press do not neglect the oppor- 

 tunity ; and as the people are more powerful than the Govern- 

 ment they are the force to be counted with. It is only just 

 to say tliat the antagonism towards us is less marked than 

 it was. 



CURIOUS " HISTORY." 



Miss Burton's narrative is somewhat challenged by 

 her singular history. She says, " We find that the 

 bitter blood of the old Covenanters, handed down 

 through the Pilgrim Fathers in self-exile, has lost little 

 of its intensity after filtering through some fifteen 

 generations." As the Pilgrim Fathers landed in 

 .\merica in 1620, and canie from Nottinghamshire 

 and thereabouts, and the Covenanters were Scotch and 

 did not come into prominence as a distinct body 

 until after 1640, the bitter blood of the old Coven- 

 anters must have described a somewhat circuitous 

 route, in defiance of chronology and of geography, in 

 order to be handed down through the Pilgrim Fathers. 



Missionary Expectations. 



In The East and the Wat for January Rev. W. E. S. 

 Holland ((uotes an Indian student who said : — 



" We will fight for casie to Ihe end ; for it is our last 

 standing-ground against Christianity. You know (|uile well 

 that, if it was not for caste, three-quarters of the men in this 

 hostel would be Christians to-day." 



Mr. Holland then goes on to speak of " the tidal 

 wave of conversion " that may be expected when 

 caste begins to break : — 



India mi>ves in caste. The castes thus permeated by Christian 

 thought and sentiment must soon begin to move. When the 

 move liegiiis tlnre will be a landslide into the t.'hurch. That 

 landslide will sweep on one side the missionary and all his wcrks. 

 There will l)e heresies galore Hut a Chrislmn nation will Iw 

 born in a ilay. 



