This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Jan. 25, 1941.
What holds the empire together? I am sure other people are wondering, too, about this. When we hear that the Cameroons have sent in enough gold to buy a Spitfire, that the Maharaja of some unknown principality in India has sent in thousands of pounds, that the Indians in northern Canada are giving half their fur catch, and others of them are handing back part of their treaty money, we think of this.
All over the world, men and women are working for Britain’s victory. New Zealand is loading ships with frozen meat and dairy products. Australian wool is on its way to Britain to be made into clothing for soldiers and civilians; bacon and wheat from Canada; gold, coffee, tea and sisal from South Africa; rubber and tin from Malaya; arms from the United States — the list is endless.
When we hear all this we feel something tingling in our veins, as we realize that our great empire lives in the hearts of people. Certainly, it is not founded on force. No one is compelled to give. We are all members of an empire at war, and there is something that holds us together — something strong as steel, but intangible as a ray of sunlight.
I think one sinew of this bond is our common inheritance of literature, the King James version of the Bible and Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, Kipling, Lincoln, all the great ones, known and unknown. It has been the habit of stern realists to belittle words — words are cheap, they say. Words cost nothing. “Words are the daughters of earth, but deeds are the sons of heaven.”
Let us forget all this. Our great commonwealth of free people who are bound together today in a great army, pledged to win or die, are held together largely by brave words, published by usage, hardened in the fire of experience; great words that have comforted many, stern words that have startled the indolent, convicted the sinful, strengthened the weak, words with fire in their heart.
I am writing this on the day President Roosevelt gave his message to Congress. His words are still ringing in my ears, with a continuity of energy like the note of a tuning fork. Tonight, I shall read them in the paper, hearing again the president’s voice in every phrase.
As I listened, knowing that I was one of many millions, I could feel his words were calling up the free people all around the world, and signing them on for the duration of the war, and after, for the making of a just peace. How his words blew away the mists of misunderstanding when he said that the dictators would make war on the United States if and when it suited them, and not because of any act of war on the part of the United States.
Norway was invaded, not for any act of war. Nor were Denmark, or Holland, or Belgium. Another sentence that glows like a jewel was this: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And here is another: “We must especially beware of the small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle to feather their own nest.”
These sentences, and others, I hope, will be written on school blackboards tomorrow, for high school students to copy and ponder; along with his amplifications of the meaning of freedom. President Roosevelt, like Prime Minister Churchill, speaks in simple words; there is a common earthy flavour in his similes. Everyone can understand them.
Never was the act of a bully more eloquently described than the president’s arraignment of Mussolini on the day he declared war on France. “The hand that held the dagger stabbed a neighbour in the back.” No one who heard him say it will ever forget the impact of this accusation. In it was the finality of the Day of Judgment.
By the miracle of radio, words like these encircle the globe, becoming the heritage of rich and poor, the wise and foolish, old and young; and because our cause is every man’s cause, great words belong to us — dynamic words, explosive words, which go off in our brains, thereby changing and remaking us.
Take the word “freedom” as extended by the president in his radio talk — Freedom to worship, freedom to work without fear. As he spoke pictures were forming and dissolving in my mind. I saw people going into churches, into synagogues, temples, mosques; men and women singing as they worked in their fields and gardens; the peasants of France in their blue smocks, leading their horses on the fields; the Dutch gardeners cultivating tulips along their canals; the artistic Czechs making beautiful pottery, clear skies over them free from enemy aircraft — happy people of all creeds, races and colours.
And the explosive part of this word — freedom — is the realization that this is not a Utopian dream. It is the normal way of life, and it is coming. Tyranny and enslavement are abnormal growths and cannot live. They are like the two-headed monstrosities that you have seen, preserved in alcohol in glass jars in museums — horrible things that you are sorry you ever saw.
Freedom is coming to birth — a new freedom for everyone in the whole world. We have been singing about it for a long time, and dreaming about it, and now we know with pride and humility that it is possible. God has promised that even the wrath of man will some day praise Him.
Even the fiery young fascists who screamed for war under Mussolini’s tutelage are learning something on the hot sands of Libya, and in the frozen hills of Albania. They are seeing a side of war that they believed would come only to their opponents, and in their defeat, humiliation and utter misery, they have no brave words to comfort them. They go into battle now because their officers compel them.
And the Germans are learning something, too, by the light of their burning arms factories and petrol tanks. They never thought this would come to them. What noble sentiments have they to comfort them in their hours of desolation, and who among the gangsters can inspire them with anything but hatred.
I began by saying that the British Empire, or rather the whole commonwealth of free people, are held together, partly at least, by words. Words have always been the weapon of liberty, and as such we must reverence them, and be careful how we use them, remembering that the gun is always loaded.
Words are bombs, and words are mines. The study of Shakespeare and Milton in India stimulate the struggle for independence.
Christ is the great revolutionary. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” And the truth is simply told.
It is this: that God is our Father, Christ our Elder Brother, who came to show us the way to live. There is enough for everyone in the world and all men are equal in God’s sight, irrespective of race or colour.
There are no superior races, and no chosen people; and no nation can live half-slave and half-free; and no spot in the world will be safe until it is all safe. Religion and science are one, and so have nothing to fear from each other.
