My Excursion Bore The
Same Relation To Their Country As A 'bus-Ride Down The Strand Bears To
London, So I Knew How They Felt.
The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are more interesting than
anybody else, and I held by birth the same right in them and their lives
as they held in any other part of the Empire.
Because they had become a
people within the Empire my right was admitted and no word spoken; which
would not have been the case a few years ago. One may mistake many signs
on the road, but there is no mistaking the spirit of sane and realised
nationality, which fills the land from end to end precisely as the
joyous hum of a big dynamo well settled to its load makes a background
to all the other shop noises. For many reasons that Spirit came late,
but since it has come after the day of little things, doubts, and open
or veiled contempts, there is less danger that it will go astray among
the boundless wealth and luxury that await it. The people, the schools,
the churches, the Press in its degree, and, above all, the women,
understand without manifestoes that their land must now as always abide
under the Law in deed and in word and in thought. This is their
caste-mark, the ark of their covenant, their reason for being what they
are. In the big cities, with their village-like lists of police court
offences; in the wide-open little Western towns where the present is as
free as the lives and the future as safe as the property of their
inhabitants; in the coast cities galled and humiliated at their one
night's riot ('It's not our habit, Sir!
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