ON ENGLAND AND THE WEST

ENGLAND

AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ST. GEORGE, AT THE HOTEL CECIL.

6th May, 1924

Though I do not think that in the life of a busy man there could be placed into his hands a more difficult toast than this, yet the first thought that comes into my mind as a public man is a feeling of satisfaction and profound thankfulness that I may use the word "England" without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out "Britain." I have often thought how many of the most beautiful passages in the English language would be ruined by that substitution which is so popular to-day. I read in your Dinner-book, "When God wants a hard thing done, He tells it," not to His Britons, but "to His Englishmen." And in the same way, to come to a very modern piece of poetry, how different it would be with the altered ending, "For in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains a Briton."

We have to-night to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint. It always seems to me no mere chance that besides being the Patron Saint of England, St. George was the Patron Saint of those gallant sailors around the shores of the Adriatic, and that in his honour there exists one of the most beautiful chapels in Venice to-day. The Patron Saint of sailors is surely the most suitable Patron Saint for men of the English stock; and I think to-night amongst ourselves we might for a minute or two look at those characteristics, contradictory often, peculiar as we believe, in that great stock of which we are all members.

The Englishman is all right as long as he is content to be what God made him, an Englishman, but gets into trouble when he tries to be something else. There are chroniclers, or were chroniclers, who said it was the apeing of the French manners by our English ancestors that made us the prey of William the Norman, and led to our defeat at Hastings. Let that be a warning to us not to ape any foreign country. Let us be content to trust ourselves and to be ourselves.

Now, I always think that one of the most curious contradictions about the English stock is this: that while the criticism that is often made of us is not without an element of truth, and that is that as a nation we are less open to the intellectual sense than the Latin races, yet though that may be a fact, there is no nation on earth that has had the same knack of producing geniuses. It is almost a characteristic of the English race; there is hardly any line in which the nation has not produced geniuses, and in a nation which many people might think restrained, unable to express itself, in this same nation you have a literature second to none that has ever existed in the world, and certainly in poetry supreme.

Then, for a more personal characteristic, we grumble, and we always have grumbled, but we never worry. Now, there is a very great truth in that, because there are foreign nations who worry but do not grumble. Grumbling is more superficial, leaves less of a mark on the character, and just as the English schoolboy, for his eternal salvation, is impervious to the receipt of learning, and by that means preserves his mental faculties further into middle age and old age than he otherwise would (and I may add that I attribute the possession of such faculties as I have to the fact that I did not overstrain them in youth), just as the Englishman has a mental reserve owing to that gift given him at his birth by St. George, so, by the absence of worry he keeps his nervous system sound and sane, with the result that in times of emergency the nervous system stands when the nervous system of other peoples breaks.

The Englishman is made for a time of crisis, and for a time of emergency. He is serene in difficulties, but may seem to be indifferent when times are easy. He may not look ahead, he may not heed warnings, he may not prepare, but when he once starts he is persistent to the death, and he is ruthless in action. It is these gifts that have made the Englishman what he is, and that have enabled the Englishman to make England and the Empire what it is.

It is in staying power that he is supreme, and fortunately, being, as I have said, to some extent impervious to intellectual impressions as a nation, he is equally impervious to criticism—a most useful thing for an English statesman. That may be the reason why English statesmen sometimes last longer than those who are not English. I admit that in past generations we carried that virtue to an excess, and by a rebound the sins of the fathers are being visited on the children. For instance, there was a time when this particular epithet was more in vogue in political society, and the Englishman invariably spoke of the "damned" foreigner. Those days are gone, but the legacy has come to us in this, that by the swing of the pendulum we have in this country what does not exist in any other, a certain section of our people who regard every country as being in the right except their own. It largely arises, I think, among a section of the population who hold beliefs which they cannot persuade their fellow-countrymen to adopt.

There is yet one other point. I think the English people are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world. With some faults on which I have touched, there is in England a profound sympathy for the under-dog. There is a brotherly and a neighbourly feeling which we see to a remarkable extent through all classes. There is a way of facing misfortunes with a cheerful face. It was shown to a marvellous degree in the war, and in spite of all that he said in criticism of his own people, Ruskin said one thing of immortal truth. He said: "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metal that can be minted. And indeed only Heaven can know what the country owes to it." There is a profound truth in that. As long as a people can laugh, they are preserved from the grosser vices of life, political and moral. And as long as they can laugh, they can face all the ills that fortune may bring upon them.

Then, in no nation more than the English is there a diversified individuality. We are a people of individuals, and a people of character. You may take the writings of one of the greatest and one of the most English of writers, Charles Dickens, and you will find that practically all his characters are English. They are all different, and each of us that has gone through this world with his eyes open and his heart open, has met every one of Dickens's characters in some position or another in life. Let us see to it that we never allow our individuality as Englishmen to be steam-rollered. The preservation of the individuality of the Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race, and if our differences are smoothed out and we lose that great gift, we shall lose at the same time our power. Uniformity of type is a bad thing. I regret very much myself the uniformity of speech. Time was, two centuries ago, when you could have told by his speech from what part of England every member of Parliament came. He spoke the speech of his fathers, and I regret that the dialects have gone, and I regret that by a process which for want of a better name we have agreed among ourselves to call education, we are drifting away from the language of the people and losing some of the best English words and phrases which have lasted in the country through centuries, to make us all talk one uniform and inexpressive language.

Now, I have very little more that I want to say to you to-night, but on an occasion like this I suppose there is no one who does not ask himself in his heart and is a little shy of expressing it, what it is that England stands for to him, and to her. And there comes into my mind a wonder as to what England may stand for in the minds of generations to come if our country goes on during the next generation as she has done in the last two, in seeing her fields converted into towns.

To me, England is the country, and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses—through the ear, through the eye, and through certain imperishable scents. I will tell you what they are, and there may be those among you who feel as I do.

The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening, or the smell of the scutch fires: that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were coming home with the result of the day's forage, when they were still nomads, and when they were still roaming the forests and the plains of the continent of Europe. These things strike down into the very depths of our nature, and touch chords that go back to the beginning of time and the human race, but they are chords that with every year of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being.

These are the things that make England, and I grieve for it that they are not the childish inheritance of the majority of the people to-day in our country. They ought to be the inheritance of every child born into this country, but nothing can be more touching than to see how the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have their tiny bit of garden if they can, will go to gardens if they can, to look at something they have never seen as children, but which their ancestors knew and loved. The love of these things is innate and inherent in our people. It makes for that love of home, one of the strongest features of our race, and it is that that makes our race seek its new home in the Dominions over-seas, where they have room to see things like this that they can no more see at home. It is that power of making homes, almost peculiar to our people, and it is one of the sources of their greatness. They go overseas, and they take with them what they learned at home: love of justice, love of truth, and the broad humanity that are so characteristic of English people. It may well be that these traits on which we pride ourselves, which we hope to show and try to show in our own lives, may survive—survive among our people so long as they are a people—and I hope and believe this, that just as to-day more than fifteen centuries since the last of those great Roman legionaries left England, we still speak of the Roman strength, and the Roman work, and the Roman character, so perhaps in the ten thousandth century, long after the Empires of this world as we know them have fallen and others have risen and fallen, and risen and fallen again, the men who are then on this earth may yet speak of those characteristics which we prize as the characteristics of the English, and that long after, maybe, the name of the country has passed away, wherever men are honourable and upright and persevering, lovers of home, of their brethren, of justice and of humanity, the men in the world of that day may say, "We still have among us the gifts of that great English race."

MY NATIVE TOWN

AT BEWDLEY

8th August, 1925

I have assisted at many functions during recent years, but at none more calculated to touch the hidden springs of the heart than that in which I have participated to-day. Bewdley, as most of you know, was in distant ages a sanctuary town to which a man, whatever his sins, might flee and be safe from justice. So whenever the rude waves of the outside world buffet me with more than usual vigour, I have only to remember that in Bewdley there is a sanctuary even for a Prime Minister.

This day has, at any rate, shown that there can be an exception to the truth contained in the words, "A prophet is not without honour, save only in his own country." I have never failed to find in my own country understanding, sympathy and support, and even when life seems most difficult and the fences in front unclimbable, I can turn back in memory and recollection to this peaceful spot by the side of the river, where I first drew breath, and in the memory of which I am able to draw strength.

There could have been no more typical English surroundings in which to cherish the earliest memories. I remember as a child looking up the river from the bridge into that mysterious and romantic land of Shropshire, so close to us, from which my people came only three generations before, and watching the smoke of the train running along the little railway through places bearing names like Wyre Forest, Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury—names steeped in romance and redolent of the springtime of an England long ago passed, but whose heritage is ours. Those names must have been familiar to Langland as he lay on the slopes of the Malvern Hills while the great poem of Piers Plowman shaped itself in his brain. I remember, too, the thrill of names like The Welch Gate and The Warden of the Marches, which brought back to me even in childhood days the fact that Bewdley, long before it was incorporated in Worcestershire, was one of the most important towns in the great Marches separating Wales from England; the title of Lord Warden of the Marches seemed to me most romantic and dignified. There were memories, too, of the long-forgotten strife between Welsh and English, of Ludlow, where the big castle still stood, and of Woodbury Hill where Owen Glendower came before the great fight beneath its slope, as the result of which the bones of English and Welsh have lain in common ground for five centuries. And one has seen how warfare may yield to peace.

It may be the recollection of those far-off days, and the intimate connection which we in the Marches had with Welshmen, that has given me a kind of affection for them, and even a sneaking affection, after all that has passed, for the greatest living Welshman, Mr. Lloyd George. I have often felt that if it were possible for His Majesty to revive the great title of Lord Warden of the Marches, I would like him to offer it to Mr. Lloyd George, on condition that he lived for three months in the year in Bewdley.

My friend the present Mayor of Bewdley has long been honourably associated with a house called The Old Pack Horse. That name reminds me of a day before grass grew on the wharves of the Severn, when Bewdley and not Liverpool was the natural export depot for Manchester, and when strings of pack-horses used to come down from Lancashire to discharge their goods at Bewdley's wharves into the "prows" which went down daily to Bristol for export to all parts of the world. Manchester and Liverpool were then smaller towns than Kidderminster is to-day. The Bridgwater Canal had not been made, and I have no doubt that in the early years of the eighteenth century the name of Bewdley was as well known in England as the names of those cities.

I think it is good for us, on an occasion like this, to dwell on these things, which show the continuity of history and bring before us the progress and the changing fortunes of our country. I spoke of the grass that has grown on the wharves on Severnside. That is true. But we still have Severn with us, and I think Severn can teach us something to-day. Rising on the slopes of Plinlimmon, she has flowed from and through Wales into England, and through our part of England. For centuries she served as a boundary and dividing line, respected by Rome and by the Celt; yet the time came when she was no longer a dividing line, but the proof of union and friendship; and while long years ago she poured her waters through country full of strife and fighting, she now waters peaceful meadows and passes through peaceful towns, with dismantled castles. It may well be that, just as she has seen strife in this country turn to peace, so again to-day, in an age when the clouds are heavy and charged with electricity, she may once more see the storm pass. But she reminds us that these things change and are effaced like the eddies on her stream; and, as of old, her deep waters will flow on through Bewdley, carrying their peace to the dwellers on Severnside, and their healing message into the heart of England.

STOURPORT

AT STOURPORT

12th January, 1925

I suppose there have been many ceremonies at which I have been present which were more magnificent than this, and made much more noise in the world, but I have never been to one that has touched me more, or one in which all the elements that can grip the heart of man can have been more present. It is a curious feeling to come down to one's own home, and to receive in one's lifetime a tribute like this of affection and goodwill, not only from one's neighbours, but from those who have known one from infancy. It is no good here for me to pretend to be anything which I am not. If I were to pretend here to have greater abilities than I have you would soon find me out, and if I pretended, as I may have done in the course of my career, that I was more simple than I really am, then again you would know exactly how far I was deviating from the strict letter of the truth. I think it is good sometimes that one should come back into that atmosphere and environment.

I think it is also a good thing that the outside world should know one or two things about Stourport, known well to us, but known very little to them. How many people in London, where they know so much, realize that Stourport was lighted with gas before the City of London was? Indeed, had it not been for the railways—and as an old Tory I am against all that kind of progress—Stourport would have been a very large town by now. We were essentially a creation of those days when people looked to the canals as being the principal method of England's navigation, and for that purpose the site of this town was chosen, I think, with uncommon skill: and, if indeed it be a desirable thing, of which I am not convinced, to grow to be a big town, we missed our chance in the early days of the railways, when the main lines running through the country passed this district by.

Stourport has the inestimable advantage of doing its work in rural surroundings. If there is anything—I will not say that has made me fit to succeed, because whether success or not will attend me I cannot tell, and any way it does not very much matter if one does one's best honestly—it is my training, which has given me, whether I can use it or not, a knowledge and a sympathy very difficult for any man to attain who has had an exclusively political training. I regard it as of the greatest value to myself that during the formative years of my life, and during the ten and twenty years when I first started work in the world, I worked in close contact with all classes of people in this country, and enjoyed, through no credit to myself, the goodwill which I have inherited from generations that have gone before me and left behind a name for honesty, fair play, right judgment, and kindliness to those with whom they worked. Through that, whether I succeed or not, I believe I have an understanding of the mind of the people of the country which I could have gained in no other way. It is through this that I have that ineradicable belief and faith in our people which sustains me through good times and evil, and it is because of this that I have every confidence that, whatever troubles may come to this country, or in this country at any time, the native strength and virtue of our people will overcome everything. There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one's whole strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end and object of my life in politics.

WORCESTER MEMORIES

AT WORCESTER

7th November, 1923

This is the second ceremony of the kind which I have attended within a short space of time, each of them of the greatest interest and honour. For any Englishman to receive the Freedom of the City of London is looked upon as one of the greatest tributes which can be paid to a man for his work; but to receive a similar tribute in one's own home county touches the heart far more, and is an honour that, perhaps, in some ways is more highly appreciated than any honour that can possibly fall to one at any time, because it is a message of sympathy and encouragement from all those who know you best, from those amongst whom you sprang and were reared, those who know you and whence you came, what you have done, all your faults and your few virtues; and yet in spite of that they combine to do this thing, and the feeling with which it is done, the unanimity, the appreciation, the goodwill, are exactly the kind of encouragement that a man needs when he has to perform such a task as mine.

As a Worcestershire man, and standing in the heart of the city of Worcester, it is very natural that one's thoughts should go back to many things—to the rock from which you were hewn, the pit from whence you were digged; and one thinks of those who went before one, whose work has contributed to make one's own life task possible. One thinks of those of one's ancestors, who left their old home in Shropshire about 150 years ago to seek their fortunes four miles inside this county at a little place that was then growing up, where Brindley had brought his new canal into Severn. One knows the struggles that they had in those days, and one knows the hard work and the careful thought and the thrift and the human kindliness that went on from generation to generation. It is interesting to remember the connection, which has lasted for about 120 years, between my own family and the old bank in Worcester. It was from the old bank 120 years ago that we raised with infinite difficulty £500. It was the old bank that helped to carry us through the crisis in the 'twenties of the last century, and much credit is due to them for having survived a period which brought down so many of the private banks throughout the kingdom. Time and time again did they stand our friends in days when we were less able to stand on our own feet than we are now, and I shall never forget it.

Having been, as it were, an emigrant from another county into Worcestershire, and having become Worcestershire by adoption, and finally Worcestershire by birth and ties for so many years, one knows in one's bones now that one is a Worcestershire man, and that there is nothing like it. One came out of this red soil, and one will return to it and lay one's bones in it, and there is no soil like it in this country. It is remembering all these things, these innumerable ties that bind one to the city and the county, that makes a ceremony of this nature so touching at a time like this.

I am just one of yourselves, who has been called to special work for the country at this time. I never sought the office. I never planned out or schemed my life. I have but one idea, which was an idea that I inherited, and it was the idea of service—service to the people of this country. My father lived in that belief all his life, and behind him members of my family, in an obviously more restricted way, practised the same thing. It is a tradition; it is in our bones; and we have to do it. That service seemed to lead one by way of business and the county council into Parliament, and it has led one through various strange paths to where one is; but the ideal remains the same, because all my life I believed from my heart the words of Browning, "All service ranks the same with God." It makes very little difference whether a man is driving a tramcar or sweeping streets or being Prime Minister, if he only brings to that service everything that is in him and performs it for the sake of mankind.

It is natural, perhaps, quite apart from one's parentage, that one should feel this, because I lived as a child in the heart of Worcestershire, by the side of one of the last of the iron forges that were left in the rural districts of England, and the impressions of childhood are those that last, and as you get older come back more strongly. Among the chief friends that I had in those days—they represented two sides of life, the industrial and the agricultural—one was a shepherd who could neither read nor write, but like many men of those days who could neither read nor write, he was a great deal more intelligent than many who can do both now. He had a face like an old pippin, and he talked the undiluted tongue of our fathers. I learned much from him. Another man that I learned much from was one who had been a workman, and who rose to be a manager, and who went to work at ten years old on a twelve-hours' night-shift, thus being a link with an industrial past which, thank God, has passed away for ever. But with such friends of one's childhood, it is little wonder that one learned a profound sympathy with and affection for the common man, of whom I am one, which has never deserted me and never will.

I learned instinctively and unconsciously another very useful lesson, and that is that a man is a gentleman by what comes from within, and I have known many in my life in all walks. I do not want to go on "reminiscing," easy as it is, but I did want to say these few things to you, because if you do not scheme and plan your life, and if you leave it perhaps in higher hands than yours, and you look back, you will see how wonderfully the little things which you never noticed at the time all seem to fit into the ultimate scheme, and that the preparation for life which you have had, which you did not understand at the time, turns out to have been the very best preparation that you could have had. I am quite sure that that intimate knowledge that I had of working people, both industrial and rural, when I was a boy, has stood me in extraordinarily good stead in the last two or three years, because that natural sympathy that I had as a child, that came from acquaintance and friendship, has so ripened that one feels when one is giving one's life in service for the people of this country one is not working for any kind of abstraction or any large party of voters, but for the human men and women who are carrying on the daily toil of the world, with whom one has worked oneself and whom one has known on terms of intimacy. It is a great strength and a great help.