Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GLASS OF FASHION CHAPTER I PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMONWEALTH Friend, call me what you will; no jot care I: I that shall stand for England till I die. England! The England that rejoiced to see Hellas unbound, Italy one and free; The England that had tears for Poland's doom, And in her heart for all the world made room; The England from whose side I have not swerved, The Immortal England whom I, too, have served, Accounting her all living lands above In Justice, and in Mercy, and in Love. William Watson. ... No people can be called fully civilised until there is widely diffused among its members the sense of their obligation, not merely to obey the law, but to obey it willingly, and to co-operate in enforcing and maintaining it.?Ramsay Muir. What is the meaning of England ? What is the political value of that name in the world, its significance in the eyes of other nations? Is it possible for us to express in simple language what we feel to be the historicaldefinition of that name, that great name of England, as Henry James has it? In the spring of 1918, Mr. Alfred Zimmern published an article in The Round Table which set before mankind, with a lucidity, a temperance, and a reverence for truth which did not always characterise our war propaganda, the three doctrines which were at that moment in perilous conflict. The guns (he said) are still speaking as in 1914, and they will go on speaking, ever more forcibly, till victory is achieved; since, in the great argument which Prussia provoked, no other decision avails. But side by side with the guns, and mixing its music with theirs, goes a running undercurrent of discussion, of questioning, of philosophising. Men who never reasoned before are turning their minds to consider the cause for which their continued ...