"These chaps have got an exaggerated idea of the importance of my personality," remarked Baden-Powell to an interviewer when the siege of Mafeking was over. Well! that's as may be, and it is good that a great man should be backward in estimating his own greatness. But we English are what we are because we love, admire, and in our own small way strive to emulate the example of our heroes, and in the man who held Mafeking for seven weary months, who heard thirty thousand shells crash into the little town, and who came out of the struggle as cheery and good-humoured as ever, we see a hero the importance of whose personality we do not think it possible to exaggerate. It will be a bad day for us when we give up putting our great men on pedestals. A great man set up upon a pedestal is a light and an incentive to thousands who, but for knowing of him, would be more than inclined to believe life a ghastly failure and to go down in its struggle without a single effort. It seems to me that in Baden-Powell's career as we have seen it so far—and may God make it go much further and to still greater things, for England's sake!—there is realized the grand central idea which runs through Browning'sEpilogue to Asolando:—
"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,Sleep to wake."No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-timeGreet the unseen with a cheer!Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed—fight on, fare everThere as here!'"
THE END
GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LTD., ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, LITTLE SUTTON STREET, CLERKENWELL, E.C.