Lost
causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland,
do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the
English political mind. As for that more facile, after-dinner
attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient
fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In
the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the
head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from
all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power. So
long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue
in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has
been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty
knows no bounds.
The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England
strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got
it. There could not be a better statement of the methods which she
employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling's:
"Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing,
Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King.
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