The Fortnightly Volume 100; (Paperback)

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 EECONSTEUCTION OP THE BKITISH EMP1KE. The cult of Little Englandism lies buried with the follies of the past; its leaders are ostracised, their followers discredited and disowned. Empire, which, at one time, found but little favour with organised Labour, has become the watchword of Britain's democracy. To paraphrase a well-known saying of the late Sir William Harcourt's, "we are all Imperialists now." And why? What has happened to bring about so drastic a change in our body politic? The reason is simple enough and easily told. It is written large and bold on the battlefields of Belgium, France, Mesopotamia, and Gallipoli. The call to arms, if it found us, as a nation, unprepared for war, found us, as a people, determined at all costs to sacrifice the last man in defence of our national honour and the preservation of our race. From north and south, east and west, men of every creed and every clime rallied to the Flag. Australians and New Zealanders, Canadians and Indians, South Africans and Newfoundlanders, leaving home and country, hurried across the seas to fight side by side with the manhood of the Motherland in the common cause of right against might. Each and all were inspired with the same spirit of patriotism, the same noble resolve, to retain intact the inheritance that has come down to us from our forefathers and to hand on to posterity, unsullied and unimpaired, those glorious traditions of liberty and justice which have made the name of Britain famous throughout the length and breadth of the civilised world. With this splendid illustration of oneness ever facing us, I shall, I know, be voicing the opinion held by every man and every woman domiciled within the borders of the British Empire when I say there must be no going back to pre-war days, no ret...