NATIONAL CONCORD.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Can you find room for a few words on an interesting coincidence which happened to-day? I was beguiling the tedium of a railway journey by reading from a volume of Goldsmith's essays which I had put, without any forethought, in my bag. The charm of the essays was so great that I barely listened to a discussion which was going on among my fellow-travellers (not uninfluential persons apparently) on the importance of national, unity in this crisis. To my astonishment, on turning over a leaf, I found myself reading an essay on " National Concord." In this there were such apposite paragraphs that I append a few:
" Opposition, when restrained within due bounds, is the salubrious gale that ventilates the opinions of the people, which might stagnate into the most abject submission. . . . Yet there is a measure in all things. . . . The auspicious gale before which the trim vessel ploughs the bosom of the sea, while the mariners are kept alert in duty and in spirits, if converted into a hurricane, overwhelms the crew with terror and confusion. The sails are rent, the cordage cracked, the masts give way; the master eyes the havoc with mute despair, and the vessel founders in the storm. . . . The opposition necessary in a free state, like that of Great Britain, is not at all incompatible with that national concord which ought to unite people on which the general safety is at stake. . . . The history of all ages teems with the fatal effects of internal discord; and were history and tradition annihilated, common sense would plainly point out the mischiefs that must arise from want of harmony and national union. Every schoolboy can have recourse to the fable of the rods, which, when united in a bundle, no strength could bond, but when separated into single twigs, a child could break with ease."
The essay is No. 15 in Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Essays. 1 send the quotations from it because it is so apt to the position in those days when " the general safety is at stake." I am one who has taken no part whatever in party politics, national or local, for
twenty-five years.—I am, Sir, Lc., Aseerswie.
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