Yet every Briton who knows thy blood in him
In that dread hour will marshal to thy side;
And if thou crumblest earth's whole frame will groan.
God help this world, thou wilt not sink alone!
The innermost secret of that faith in Britain and that spontaneous loyalty to her—the real reason why our kindred, who are separated from us and have shaped themselves into new, independent nations, feel that Britain is still worth fighting and dying for is enshrined again, I think, in a poem by an Australian, John Farrel, who has been dead these fourteen years. He and his countrymen know the worst of us, but they know the best of us too, and believe that the best more than atones for the worst. No enemy has indicted us more scathingly than he, in his 'Australia to England.' He does not forget that we have lapsed into evil, have been guilty of sins of greed, cruelty, hypocrisy; that
Some hands you taught to pray to Christ
Have prayed His curse to rest on you—
yet, when he has reckoned up all our
