in a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. there are thousands of englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle, who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom, from john o’ groat’s to the land’s-end, bringing up their families in the love of god and their neighbor, and keeping the atmosphere around them clean, and pure, and strong, by their example—men who would come to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.

one is too apt to fancy, from the photographs of the nation’s life which one gets day by day, that the old ship has lost the ballast which has stood her in such good stead for a thousand years, and is rolling more and more helplessly, in a gale which shows no sign of abating, for her or any other national vessel, until at last she must roll over and founder. but it is not so. england[107] is in less stress, and in better trim, than she has been in many a stiffer gale.

the real fact is, that nations, and the families of which nations are composed, make no parade or fuss over that part of their affairs which is going right. national life depends on home life, and foreign critics are inclined to take the chronicles of our divorce court as a test by which to judge the standard of our home-life, like the old gentleman who always spelt through the police reports to see “what people were about.” an acquaintance, however, with any average english neighborhood, or any dozen english families taken at random, ought to be sufficient to re-assure the faint-hearted, and to satisfy them that (to use the good old formula) the lord has much work yet for the nation to do, and the national manliness and godliness left to do it all, notwithstanding superficial appearances.