XXXVIII. What shall we say of England and her hundred petty wars 'smouldering' in every part of the globe?
Statistics we have none, and no evidence of tangible decline that Englishmen will not indignantly repudiate. Besides, in the struggle for national influences, England has had many advantages which must hide or neutralize the waste of war. In default of facts unquestioned, we may appeal to the poets, letting their testimony as to the reversal of selection stand for what it is worth. Kipling tells us of the cost of the rule of the sea:
"We have fed our sea for a thousand years.
And she calls us, still unfed;
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead."
"If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we have paid it in full."
Again, referring to dominion on land, he says:
"Walk wide of the widow of Windsor,
For half of creation she owns.
We've bought her the same with the sword and the flame,
And we've salted it down with our bones.
Poor beggars, it's blue with our bones."
Finer than this are the lines in the 'Revelry of the Dying,' written by a British officer, Bartholomew Dowling, it is said, who died in the plague in India:
"Cut off from the land that bore us.
Betrayed by the land we find;
When the brightest are gone before us
And the dullest are left behind.
So stand to your glasses steady,
Tho' a moment the color flies,
Here's a cup to the dead already
And huzza for the next that dies!"
The stately "Ave Imperatrix' of Oscar Wilde, the last flicker of dying genius in his wretched life, contains lines that ought not to be forgotten:
"O thou whose wounds are never healed.
Whose weary race is never run;
O Cromwell's England, must thou yield
For every foot of ground a son?
"What matter if our galleys ride
Pine forest-like on every main;
Ruin and wreck are at our side.
Stem warders of the house of pain.
