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Taranaki Daily News, 13 December 1917, Page 4

THE GENIUS OF ENGLAND. That the genius of England should tiee in honor and in success over the crisis of victory is of no sliglvt moment to the work of which victory iB hut the prelude (states the London Observer). The selflessness, chivalry, and generosity which lay themselves open to the attacks we have described are qualities that must impregnate the re-settlemont if it is to satisfy and to endure. Let us not fail to remember, then, that England is the main propulsive force of the world's destiny, and that the diffusion of her spirit is the most valuable promise- of true peace. Even as she has given mankind half of its science and nine-tenths of its poetry, so has she bestowed on it almost the whole of that code of statecraft by which alone strength can be wedded with progress and safety with right. There is no free people to-day that has not fed from ner experience and copied her institutions. There is no other political philosophy than hers extant by which nations can lj reared in that service which is perfect freedom or led to bear and forbear with each other in the name of that higher justice which has neither court nor scaffold of its own. England has been, and still is, the school of statesmanship in which patience, modoration and tolerance, the equal avoidance of autocracy and anarchy, the balance of the parts with the whole, are upheld with a dauntless faith, and practised with untiring sincerity. Her allies in this war have learnt something ;of the depths of her altruism, and will bear their testimony to it in due season. It i has convinced them far beyond any possible dialectic of what the faith and gospel of England mean for the content-. ment, tranquility, and moral confidence of that world which tho war is to leave behind it. Jt is probable that the elemental powers of truth, honor and good will that rule the temperament of England can never be measured by her own sons as they are by those who have come from sister nationalities to partake of* her life and to share her labors. It is only from the objective point that it is possible to realise her boundless, friendship and loyalty, her immaculate good faith, her freedom from what is petty and jealous, her wise and long-suffering patience with the perverse, her persistent appeal to the better instinct of humanity—the siii;.'....; magnanimity, in fact, that sums up all of this and so much more. No nation puts less into its words and more into its deeds. What it has done in this war, when all is known will be a testament commanding the reverence of history and creating new ties for all humanity with this mighty and motherly land. I