§ 7

Think of it, craftsmen and builders, and all of us who value the soul of England! Think of it, farmers, agricultural labourers, and all who live on and by the land! Your cities would be desolate wastes, your land poisoned, your women ravished, your children spiked by bayonet thrusts, your old men and women shot or tortured. That is what would have happened had Germany’s materialism prevailed! Having done this, would the soul of England been slain. No!! No conqueror ever killed the soul of a country conquered. A country commits suicide, that’s the way its soul is killed, and that is the way Germany destroyed herself.

A country may poison itself, degrade itself by self-indulgence and greed to the lowest level; it may kill in itself every good for which it has been favoured, and so kill its soul; but slain by a foreign power—never! The thought of what might have happened to us, and which was nearer happening than many of us will allow, should set us thinking of England’s mighty past. Setting the success of her commerce aside, do we quite value at their true value the legacy of riches which our ancestors have bequeathed? Do we esteem as we should the builders of our cathedrals, the unrivalled beauty of the English parish and village church? Do we esteem at their due English craftsmen (the first in the world) and what noble work they left us? Do we value the great creative minds of our predecessors? I sometimes wonder if we are forgetting the very things which illustrate the beauty of the English soul in a rush after materialism, which seems to pay a momentary interest. Are we travelling, or have we been travelling along a road which has proved the road to ruin of Germany? I think sometimes we have been. Are we permitting Industrialism to kill our souls? I am not sure we are not! But more of that presently. What saved England in the four years of her great danger and trial? Her Government did not. It was not officialdom that prevented our ruin, it was that the heart of England was still sound, notwithstanding grievous temptations to break it. Notwithstanding false doctrines of Equality taught by ignorant extremists, our workmen still saw straight according to their ancient traditions as yet unbroken, as yet deaf to “catch words” from noisy rhetoric out of the mouths of ignorant and mischievous leaders inflated by vanity and rendered blind by egotism and desire for power over a more ignorant but clear-thinking workman.