MR. BRYCE ON INSTRUCTION IN PATRIOTISM.
MR. BRYCE, in his speech of Saturday to the Head Teachers of London, hit the weak place in the popular feeling of the Englishman of to-day ; but whether he sug- gested the true remedy we are not quite so sure. There can be little doubt, we fear, that patriotism is decaying among us, or, as the speaker himself put it, with that restraint of rhetoric which is so effective in a book, and so chilling in a popular address, that " there is really less interest taken in our national life and achievements than there used to be, and than with our diffused knowledge we should expect there to be." Many causes have worked together for that result. It seems to be true, in the first place, that knowledge, as it increases, rather tends, by widening the horizon, to dissolve patriotism. The perfect patriots, in the ordinary sense, are men like the Russians and Chinese, who know nothing outside their own boundaries, and cannot even conceive of interests wider than those of the countries in which they have the immense merit to be born. They will do and suffer anything rather than Russia or China shall be less great, or less the object of a special divine favour. The Englishman has learned of late to merge his country in " the Empire " and the Empire in the world, until, when appealed to in the name of patriotism, he is half- suspicious of his own motives, and inclined to doubt whether he is not invited to yield to a subtle form of selfishness. He forgets that as far as character is concerned, the com- munity is made up of individuals ; that the duty of a nation, as of an individual, may be to guide and not to obey, and that if England loses a portion of her self-respect, Europe, and there- fore the world, has lost something of its force. Cosmopoli- tanism has recently gathered too much strength among us, and this at a moment when patriotism suffers from many weakening influences. The increase of intercourse, the habit of emigration, the whole industrial movement with its habit of testing all results by profit, have tended to breed the feeling, for expressing which a French orator was last week hooted in the Chamber,—the feeling that " where we prosper, there, and nowhere else, is our country." The citizen tests the value of his citizenship by his rate of wages. He cannot feel with St. Paul pride in his citizenship, even though it has not saved him from being flogged. He com- pares his wages with those prevalent in America and Australia, and is half inclined to think himself a citizen of a mean city. In his best mood, too, he has a tendency that way,—for pity is of no country, and the development of the passion of pity, fostered as it is by the ease with which that passion can be in- dulged, exhausts sympathies which, wisely or unwisely, were once in practice reserved for our own folk. The tribal instinct is not a lofty one, but it keeps patriotism very warm. And, lastly, English patriotism has suffered greatly from the absence of recent danger to England. Men feel most for their country when the country is threatened, and for more than seventy years England has thought herself so secure that her people hardly comprehend what their emotion would be, or what their sense of special kinship to each other, if they were seriously menaced with invasion. The result of all these cir- cumstances on a people without traditions has been, as Mr. Bryce says, a decline in national interest—that is, in patriotism —a decline so marked in England proper that there seems to be scarcely any national feeling left, and that, even among patriots, the interests of England by herself are the last to be considered. It is all quite true, and we do not wonder that to any man who like Mr. Bryce knows English history, and who is aware that in Scotland patriotism is still glowing, the decline of the sentiment in England seems most deplorable ; but, then, where is the remedy to be found P Mr. Bryce finds it in the Head Teachers, and tells them to instruct their pupils in his- tory, in patriotic poetry (this in a sort of aside, as if the orator were talking to himself), and in the working of the Constitu- tion ; the latter, of course, in the broadest and most general way. Well, that sounds like good advice, and, indeed, it is good advice; but it is advice which Head Teachers would say it was singularly difficult to follow. Patriotic poetry they could teach, if they had it ; but where is it to be found of the kind which children can appreciate ? It is the strangest of the many pecu- liarities of our people that, with their wonderful history, they have developed no popular patriotic poetry, unless we except a sea-song or two, and especially no poetry embodying a concep- tion of grand internal national life. Scotland has such poetry, and Ireland in profusion, but not England. There are wonderful poems, no doubt, about England, and her place among the nations—one of the most spirit-stirring, curiously enough, having been written by a foreigner, Schiller—but they are not popular, nor do we think they can ever become so. Something is wanting to endear them to the common English mind : it may be that body of tradition, which has helped Burns's vivid verses, " Scots wha hae," to burn themselves into his country- men's mind, until the mere sound of the tune serves as a summons for all Scotohmen to display unselfish endurance. Even the National Hymn, though in one way it suits English- men, being of the prayerful form in which their emotion is apt to express itself, lacks go and energy and pride, such as should distinguish a patriotic chant ; and there is no other song, except, perhaps, " Rule, Britannia," which is so much as universally known. We fear greatly that we must wait for the poetry until the poetry is pro- duced, and then, if men catch fire from the melody, there will be little need for the efforts of Head Teachers. As for history, we incline sometimes to despair; it seems so im- possible to teach Englishmen the history of their own land. There is no foundation to build upon. The Scotch, and most races of the Continent, the French excepted—they only remember back to 1789—know so much from fire-side lore, that is, from oral tradition, that the teacher's task is easy,— he has only to clarify and expand stories which are already household words, but the uncultivated Englishmen know nothing. They have forgotten the long roll of their Kings, Alfred excepted, and perhaps Elizabeth ; they do not know how the House of Commons was born, and they cannot tell in the least whence or how the Queen derives her title to be their Sovereign. It has all to be taught from the beginning, and even if the weary teachers were the men to bring out the dramatic features of the tale—and no others will stick—there is not the necessary time. Besides, the creeds and the parties would go half mad with bitterness over any version of the story with which they disagreed, or which for any reason they might wish should be sunk in oblivion. Half of them would scent danger in a true account of Henry VIII., and the other half in an estimate of Oliver Cromwell. It is a pity, but we have little hope of vivifying historic teaching in the national schools. There is more in the suggestion that a clear idea should be given to children of the Constitution. The Americans have done that, with the result that their governing document has taken its place by the side of the Bible, and that millions have been reared who stood the hardest of all tests,—the demand that they should give their lives for it ; and we will not doubt that something might be done in England also by teachers willing to exert themselves and put enthusiasm into their work. The children might, at least, hear of the wonderful success of the Constitution in reconciling law and liberty, in building up a mighty State, in training a whole people to the work of government, and good might in that way be accomplished ; but we must not expect too much. The indefiniteness which is the strength of our system of government, its balance of forces, its concealment of one ultimate Sovereign under the ermine of another, makes the Constitution terribly difficult to explain with any approach to exact verity, and still more difficult to explain so as to call out that " civisme," that loyalty to the State and the Municipality, which Mr. Bryce and we ourselves so strongly desire. The end could be
attained, for it has in a great degree been attained in Bir- mingham ; but it will need the efforts of men who can fire the imagination more than the average Head Teachers ever will. They are too intent, very naturally, on subjects which will pay ; while those who would speak with enthusiasm frequently desire nothing so much as to strip the "veil" from the "Re- public," and break with all the past.
We should ourselves, if it were our lot to try to cure this weakness in our English system, trust more to the efforts of orators and lecturers than to the school teachers. The orator can explain and describe, and can, if the gift is in him, fulfil much of the function of the poet. He does do it in America. We all laugh, and Americans themselves smile, at "Fourth of July " orations, with their high-falutin' hymns to the Con- stitution ; but it is by no means certain that the impression of grandeur and stability which the Constitution makes on the American masses, is not derived in great part from the impact made on unformed minds by those very orations. We do not wish for " Fourth of July " speeches on this side of the water ; but we do believe that our public men might arouse a little more interest in the national history than they do,— might, in fact, educate the people, as Mr. Bryce desires, to a fuller conception of their own greatness. They, rather than the schoolmasters, would be for this purpose the best Head Teachers, the schoolmasters confining themselves rathei to instruction in facts.
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