Essays in Rebellion by Henry W. Nevinson

Author:Henry W. Nevinson [Nevinson, Henry W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2004-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

"This is the Norman nobly born,

Who conquered the Dane that drank from a horn.

Who harried the Saxon's kine and corn,

Who banished the Roman all forlorn,

Who tidied the Celt so tattered and torn,"

and so on, back to the prehistoric Jack who built the long house of the dead.

Our later subjections to the French, the Scots, the Dutch and the Germans, who have in turn ruled our courts and fattened on their favours, have not been so violent or so complete; but for some centuries they depressed our people with a sense of humiliation, and they have left their mark upon our national character and language. Indeed, our language is a synopsis of conquests, a stratification of subjections. We can hardly speak a sentence without recording a certain number of the subject races from which we have sprung. The only one ever left out is the British, and that survives in the names of our most beautiful rivers and mountains. It is true that all of our conquerors have come to stay—all with the one exception of Rome. We have never formed part of a distant and foreign empire except the Roman. Even our Norman invaders soon regarded our country as the centre of their power and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race, and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Perhaps also for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and contrite heart, lest we forget our history—lest we forget.

We pray in contrite humility to remember, but we have forgotten. In speaking of Finland's loss of liberty, Madame Malmberg, the Finnish patriot, once said that in old days, when their liberties seemed secure, the Finns felt no sympathy with other nationalities—the Poles, the Georgians, or the Russians themselves—struggling to be free. They did not know what it was to be a subject race. They could not realise the degrading loss of nationality. They were soon to learn, and they know now. We have not learned. We have forgotten our lesson. That is why we remain so indifferent to the cry of freedom, and to the suppression of nationality all over the world.

Let us for a moment imagine that something terrible has happened; that our statesmen have at last got their addition sums in Dreadnoughts right, and have learned by hard experience that we have less than two to one and therefore are wiped from the seas; or that our august Russian ally, using Finland as a base, has established an immense naval port in the Norwegian fiords and thence poured the Tartar and Cossack hordes over our islands. Let us imagine anything that might leave some dominant Power supreme in London and reduce us for the sixth or seventh time to the position of a subject race.

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