England Your England
cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a
change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it
will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized
will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms
will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange
will be pulled down, the horse plough
will give way to the tractor, the country houses
will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match
will be forgotten, but England
will still be England, an
everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the
power to
change out of recognition and yet remain the same.