The tourist who has embarked for the British Isles lands usually at
Liverpool, Fishguard, or Plymouth, whence a special steamer-train takes
him in a few hours to London. In landing at Plymouth, he has passed,
outside the harbor, Eddystone, most famous of lighthouses, and has seen
waters in which Drake overthrew the Armada of Philip II.
Once the tourist leaves the ship he is conscious of a new environment.
Aboard the tender (if there be one) he will feel this, in the custom house
formalities, when riding on the steamer-train, on stepping to the station
platform at his destination, when riding in the tidy taxicab, at the door
and in the office of his hotel, in his well-ordered bedroom, and at his
initial meal. First of all, he will appreciate the tranquility, the
unobtrusiveness, the complete efficiency, with which service is rendered
him by those employed to render it.
When Lord Nelson, before beginning the battle of Trafalgar, said to his
officers and sailors that England expected "every man to do his duty," the
remark was merely one of friendly encouragement and sympathy, rather than
of stern discipline, because every man on board that fleet of ships
already expected to do his duty. Life in England is a school in which
doing one's duty becomes a fundamental condition of staying "in the game."
Not alone sailors and soldiers know this, and adjust their lives to it,
but all classes of public and domestic servants--indeed, all men are
subject to it, whether servants or barristers, lawmakers or kings.
Emerging from his hotel for a walk in the street, the tourist, even tho
his visit be not the first, will note the ancient look of things. Here are
buildings that have survived for two, or even five, hundred years, and yet
they are still found fit for the purposes to which they are put. Few
buildings are tall, the "skyscraper" being undiscoverable. On great and
crowded thoroughfares one may find buildings in plenty that have only two,
or at most three, stories, and their windows small, with panes of glass
scarcely more than eight by ten. The great wall mass and dome of St.
Paul's, the roof and towers of Westminster Abbey, unlike the lone spire of
old Trinity in New York, still rise above all the buildings around them as
far as the eye can reach, just about as they did in the days of Sir
Christopher Wren.
Leaving a great thoroughfare for a side street, a stone's throw may bring
one to a friend's office, in one of those little squares so common in the
older parts of London. How ancient all things here may seem to him, the
very street doorway an antiquity, and so the fireplace within, the hinges
and handles of the doors. From some upper rear window he may look out on
an extension roof of solid lead, that has survived, sound and good, after
the storms of several generations, and beyond may look into an ancient
burial ground, or down upon the grass-plots and ample walks around a
church (perchance the Temple Church), and again may see below him the tomb
of Oliver Goldsmith.
In America we look for antiquities to Boston, with her Long Wharf, or
Faneuil Hall; to New York, with her Fraunccs Tavern and Van Cortlandt
Manor House; to Jamestown with her lone, crumbling church tower; to the
Pacific coast with her Franciscan mission houses; to St. Augustine with
her Spanish gates; but all these are young and blushing things compared
with the historic places of the British Isles. None of them, save one, is
of greater age than a century and a half. Even the exception (St.
Augustine) is a child in arms compared with Westminster Hall, the Tower of
London, St. Martin's of Canterbury, the ruined abbey of Glastonbury, the
remains of churches on the island of Iona, or the oldest ruins found in
Ireland.
What to an American is ancient history, to an Englishman is an affair of
scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of
1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman--the
event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven
hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as
a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of
the British Empire. We fought single-handed with Indians, it is true, and
we cooperated with the mother country in wresting the continent from the
French, but all this history, in a technical sense, is English history
rather than the history of the United States.
Our Revolution occurred in the reign of the Third George; back of it runs
a line of other Hanoverian kings, of Stuart kings, of Tudor kings, of
Plantagenet kings, of Norman kings, of Saxon kings, of Roman governors, of
Briton kings and queens, of Scottish tribal heads and kings, of ancient
Irish kings. Long before Caesar landed in Kent, inhabitants of England had
erected forts, constructed war chariots, and reared temples of worship, of
which a notable example still survives on Salisbury Plain. So had the
Picts and Scots of Caledonia reared strongholds and used war chariots, and
so had Celts erected temples of worship in Ireland, and Phoenicians had
mined tin in Cornwall. When Cavaliers were founding a commonwealth at
Jamestown and the Puritans one on Massachusetts Bay, the British Isles
were six hundred years away from the Norman conquest, the Reformation of
the English church had been effected, Chaucer had written his "Tales,"
Bacon his "Essays," and Shakespeare all but a few of his "Plays."
Of the many races to whom belong these storied annals--Briton, Pict, Scot,
Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norman--we of America, whose ancestral lines run back
to those islands, are the far-descended children, heirs actual. Our
history, as a civilized people, began not in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, not at Jamestown, not at Plymouth Rock, but there in the
northeastern Atlantic, in lands now acknowledging the sway of the
Parliament of Westminster, and where, as with us, the speech of all is
English. Not alone do we share that speech with them, but that matchless
literature, also English, and more than that, racial customs, laws and
manners, of which many are as old as the Norman conquest, while others,
for aught we know, are survivals from an age when human sacrifices were
made around the monoliths of Stonehenge.
It is not in lands such as these that any real American can ever feel
himself a stranger. There lies for so many of us the ancestral home--in
that "land of just and of old renown," that "royal throne of kings," that
"precious stone set in the silver sea," that "dear, dear land, dear for
her reputation through the world."