X.
Lambkin’s Leader
Mr. Solomon was ever determined to keep theSunday Englishmanat a high level. “We owe it” (he would say) “first to the public who are thereby sacrificed—I mean satisfied—and to ourselves, who secure thereby a large and increasing circulation.” [“Ourselves” alluded to the shareholders, for theSunday Englishmanwas a limited Company, in which the shares (of which Mr. Solomon held the greater number) were distributed in the family; the tiniest toddler of two years old was remembered, and had been presented with a share by his laughing and generous parent.]
In this laudable effort to keep “abreast of the times” (as he phrased it), the Editor and part Proprietor determined to have leaders written by University men, who from their position of vantage enjoy aunique experience in practical matters. He had formed a very high opinion of Lambkin’s journalistic capacity from his unpublished letters as a special correspondent. Indeed, he was often heard to say that “a man like him was lost at Oxford, and was born for Fleet Street.” He wrote, therefore, to Mr. Lambkin and gave him “Carte Blanche,” as one French scholar to another, sending him only the general directions that his leader must be “smart, up-to-date, and with plenty of push,” it was to be “neither too long nor too short,” and while it should be written in an easy familiar tone, there should be little or no seriously offensive matter included.
Mr. Lambkin was delighted, and when at his request the article had been paid for, he sent in the following:
The Leader.
“The English-Speaking Race has—if we except the Dutch, Negro, and Irish elements—a marvellous talent for self-government. From the earliest origins of our Anglo-Saxonforefathers to the latest Parish Council, guided but not controlled by the modern ‘Mass Thegen’ or local ‘Gesithcund man,’ this talent, or rather genius, is apparent. We cannot tell why, in the inscrutable designs of Providence, our chosen race should have been so specially gifted, but certain it is that wherever plain ordinary mensuch as I who write this and you who read it,[60]may be planted, there they cause the desert to blossom, and the waters to gush from the living rock. Who has not known, whether among his personal acquaintance or from having read of him in books, the type of man who forms the strength of this mighty national organism? And who has not felt that he is himself something of that kidney? We stand aghast at our own extraordinary power, and it has been finely said that Nelson was greater than he knew. From one end of the earth to the other the British language is spoken and understood. The very words that I am writing will be read to-morrow in London, the day after in Oxford—andfrom this it is but a step to the uttermost parts of the earth.
“Under these conditions of power, splendour, and domination it is intolerable that the vast metropolis of this gigantic empire should be pestered with crawling cabs. There are indeed many things which in the Divine plan have it in their nature to crawl. We of all the races of men are the readiest to admit the reign of universal law. Meaner races know not the law, but we are the children of the law, and where crawling is part of the Cosmos we submit and quit ourselves like men, being armed with the armour of righteousness. Thus no Englishman (whatever foreigners may feel) is offended at a crawling insect or worm. A wounded hare will crawl, and we Read that ‘the serpent was cursed and crawled upon his belly’; again, Aristotle in his Ethics talks of those whose nature (φύσις) it is ‘ἕρπειν,’ which is usually translated ‘to crawl,’ and Kipling speaks of fifes ‘crawling.’ With all this we have no quarrel, but the crawling cab is a shocking and abominable thing; and if the titled ownersof hansoms do not heed the warning in time they will find that the spirit of Cromwell is not yet dead, and mayhap the quiet determined people of this realm will rise and sweep them and their gaudy gew-gaws and their finnicky high-stepping horses, and their perched-up minions, from the fair face of England.”