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 HER, STORY AND HER, 
 
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 ditorof The Children's Newspaper and 
 The Children's" Encyclopedia* 
 
 HODDER, 8* SfTOXJ0HTON LIMITED 
 LONDON
 
 TO 
 
 MARJORIE
 
 Annex 
 
 DA 
 
 THE ISLAND IN THE 
 MIDDLE OF THE WORLD 
 
 // you take up a globe of the world, and hold it so that 
 you see the greatest possible space of land, you will see 
 a red spot in the middle. It is Little Treasure Island. 
 
 Far away from the Island, out in Saskatchewan, a 
 Red Indian schoolboy was looking at a map. They showed 
 him the British Isles, and he looked with astonishment at 
 the little spots. He could hardly believe so small a space 
 stood for the home of the British Empire. 
 
 Moving his fingers across the wide Atlantic Ocean, he 
 said at last, " The men who navigate ships from America 
 to England must be very wise and clever." " Yes, they are," 
 replied his teacher ; " but what makes you think so ? " 
 " Because," said the Red Indian boy, " it is wonderful 
 that they do not sail past England without seeing it" 
 
 So lost on the map of the world is the Island, and yet 
 in all the boundless universe does any speck of earth so 
 thrill with pride ? No nobler thing can happen to any 
 boy or girl than to be born upon this precious isle set in a 
 silver sea, from which has gone out to the ends of the earth 
 a spirit of freedom, a love of truth, a thirst for knowledge, 
 a yearning for justice, a faith in God, a hope for immor- 
 tality, without which the world could never be the happy 
 place it is to live in.
 
 THE ISLAND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD 
 
 As the grain of mustard seed grows till it covers the 
 field, so the seed of the spirit of the Island has grown till 
 it covers the earth ; so completely has it covered the earth 
 that if some terrible catastrophe could sink the Island in 
 the sea, or shatter it to dust to be blown on the wind, still 
 its greatness would live on in the love of home, and 
 freedom, and truth, and justice, and order, and beauty, 
 that the Islanders have planted everywhere. 
 
 Looking back through the ages, we find that here and 
 there the spirit of the Island, working always in the lives 
 of its people and spreading quietly everywhere, has at times 
 burst suddenly on the world like a thing from the skies, 
 so that the world has stood and wondered as a child at the 
 opening of a rose or the rising of the sun ; and at these 
 times the power of the Island has been the most precious 
 thing on earth, crushing the oppressor, releasing the captive, 
 uplifting the fallen, and bringing new strength and hope to 
 millions of mankind. 
 
 Often men have seen it in the past ; we who live have 
 seen it ; we shall see it yet again. What is it, this eternal 
 spirit of the Island ? What is it that she has given to man- 
 kind? Why is it that the hearts of men thrill everywhere 
 when the name of England sounds? What is it that she 
 stands for in the world, this rare little beautiful land ? 
 
 This central glory of the earth, this island like a garden 
 in the middle of the world, this Mother England with her 
 thousand years of Time here is a touch of her from one 
 who finds her fair to see, and hopes that Heaven is half so 
 beautiful. A. M.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE ISLAND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD . . Introduction 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 SCENES IN THE STORY OF THE ISLAND 
 
 1. THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD ' ' . . . 3 
 
 2. THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS . . . . .17 
 
 3. HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS TO THE ISLAND . 32 
 
 4. THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND .... 46 
 
 5. THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND .... 61 
 
 6. THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND ..... 78 
 
 II 
 
 SCENES IN THE GLORY OF THE ISLAND 
 
 7. THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND ...... 95 
 
 8. A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 107 
 
 9. WHERE GOD LIVES ........ 122 
 
 10. SHAKESPEARE ......... 133 
 
 11. THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND .... 151 
 
 12. A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY ...... 164 
 
 13. THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS ...... 176 
 
 III 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE OF THE ISLAND 
 
 14. THE WATCHWORD OF THE GREAT ADVENTURE . . . 187 
 
 15. A MESSAGE TO MARS 189 
 
 16. THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 202
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAOK 
 
 17. THE GERMAN EMPEROR WALKS OUT OF CIVILISATION . 211 
 
 18. THE KAISER HOISTS THE PIRATE'S FLAG . . . . 214 
 
 19. THE WILD BEAST BREAKS LOOSE ..... 219 
 
 20. THE MOST THRILLING MOMENT OF THE GREAT WAR . . 224 
 
 21. THE SIGHT OF THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE . . 232 
 
 22. THE MOTHER OF THE ISLAND TALKS TO HER CHILDREN . 250 
 
 23. THE DAUNTLESS MEN AND THEIR DEATHLESS DEEDS . . 256 
 
 24. THE RED MEN OF HISTORY . . . . .' . 280 
 
 25. THE GREAT SHADOW IS LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND . . 284 
 
 26. WHAT THE WORLD FOUND ON THE BATTLEFIELDS . . 294 
 
 27. A MESSAGE FROM MARS . . . . . . . 303 
 
 28. ALL'S WELL . . . . ; ' . . 810
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 facing page 
 
 Shakespeare looks out on this realm, this England Frontispiece 
 The Flag ~ . .16 
 
 It is not true to say there are no blots upon our flag the saddest 
 
 thing the Island ever did was to burn this stainless maid 17 
 
 Sir Francis Drake climbs up into a tree and discovers the Pacific, 
 praying that the day may come when he may sail that sea in 
 an English ship ........ 32 
 
 A glory of the Island that has stood 700 years Salisbury Cathedral 
 
 as painted by Constable, the master artist of our countryside . 83 
 
 Old Time looks down on a new traveller . . (Colour plate) 40 
 
 Down these old roads there passed the ancient British chieftain 
 with his coat of skin, the Roman passing with his coat of 
 mail, the Saxon and the Dane, and the Norman passing from 
 keep to keep ......... 48 
 
 The ancient men of the Island set out on a voyage of exploration : 
 
 a scene on the river, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago . 49 
 
 A necklace for a little maid a hundred thousand years ago on the 
 
 banks of the river ....... 64 
 
 Nineteen centuries ago on the banks of the river the Roman 
 general directs the building of the Roman house now buried 
 under a field in Kent ....... 64 
 
 The conqueror of the world in chains in this prison cell Claudia, 
 the British lady who befriended Paul in Rome, would come 
 to talk with the captive in the days when he was brought 
 before Agrippa ........ 65 
 
 One of the greatest days in the story of the Island was when the 
 
 high priest Coifi rode up Goodmanham Lane to smash the idols 65 
 
 " That little sparrow, flying through the great hall, helped to shape 
 
 the course of England's history " . . . . .80 
 
 Bertha, wife of Ethelbert, King of Kent 81 
 
 Ethelburga, daughter of Queen Bertha and wife of King Edwin. 81 
 
 His mind would travel with the waves far out on the voyage of his 
 
 dreams . (Colour plate) 88
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing paye 
 
 Twelve hundred years ago old Bede sat in his school at Jarrow, 
 teaching the boys of the Island the things that were to make 
 the Island great . . . . . . . .96 
 
 Older than the flag are these works of men's hands that stand 
 about the Island St. Martin's Cross, which has stood on lona 
 Island since the early days of Christianity there. . . 97 
 
 For every victim of the great plague there was a victim of the 
 witchcraft laws, whose terror is over these poor women, 
 brought lip from Lancashire to be examined oy the great 
 William Harvey ........ 112 
 
 In that world in which our greatest Englishman lived and moved 
 the Island stood in constant terror of death, and plague 
 stalked through the land, cutting down men and women and 
 little children ....... . : ^ .,... . . 118 
 
 " The days when Milton would play his organ with Cromwell 
 
 listening "......... 128 
 
 The pageantry of Queen Elizabeth while Sir Walter Raleigh, the 
 
 noblest figure of her era, languished in the Tower . . .129 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh, released from the Tower, pays homage at the 
 
 tomb of Queen Elizabeth . . . . . . .144 
 
 Here, down the great street of liberty that we call Whitehall, 
 have walked the rulers and shapers of the Island for a thousand 
 years .......... 144 
 
 If we run out of Whitehall through the Horse Guards, and move 
 backwards across the square towards the Prime Minister's 
 garden wall, a striking thing happens. Amid the strange 
 tangle of wires that keep the Admiralty in touch with our ships 
 at sea, Lord Nelson comes peeping up . . . .145 
 
 Robert Blake calls on Cromwell in the council room in Whitehall . 145 
 
 Nobly in Whitehall stands the Board of Education, which has in its 
 keeping the minds of millions of little men and women who 
 will rule the Island in the good time coming . . . 160 
 
 The glory of our great Cathedrals sunlight falling through 
 
 the windows of Westminster Abbey ..... 161 
 
 The country is afire with red and gold, and all our little world is 
 
 like a window into Paradise . . . (Colour plate) 168 
 
 From a hill-top in Kent, Kit's Coty House, the grave of an ancient 
 soldier, looks down on the red-roofed village of Aylesford, 
 where was fought the first-known battle on English soil . 176 
 
 The days when coal was being formed in the Island, probably 
 
 twenty million years ago . . . . . . " . 176
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing page 
 
 The days of the great reptiles and the flying dragon, probably 
 
 twelve million years ago . . . . . . .176 
 
 The days when the white walls of Dover were being built up, 
 
 probably eight million years ago ;> .<*.. . . . 176 
 
 The days when the giant sloth ate off the tops of trees, probably 
 
 a million years ago . . . . . . . 177 
 
 The Island in the ice age the days of the mammoth and the 
 
 great cave bear, probably 400,000 years ago . . . 177 
 
 The Conqueror of the Island man . . , * . . 177 
 A corridor in the Norman Keep at Rochester .... 177 
 
 The ancient glory that the conqueror saw the most impressive 
 
 Norman ruin still standing : the Keep at Rochester . . 177 
 
 This was the world, and I was King ..... 192 
 Julius Caesar writing a letter to Rome from his tent in Kent 198 
 Shakespeare creeps like a snail unwillingly to school . . . 208 
 
 Through our English woodlands long ago there walked a boy of 
 
 Stratford, drinking in the scenes of wonder . . . 208 
 
 Believing Juliet dead, Romeo buys poison for himself from the 
 
 poor apothecary ......... 209 
 
 One of the most pathetic scenes in Shakespeare Arthur's appeal 
 
 to Hubert 209 
 
 Touchstone, the merry companion of Rosalind and Celia, in the 
 
 forest of Arden 224 
 
 The merry-hearted Autolycus, the snapper-up of unconsidered 
 
 trifles, offers his wares ....... 225 
 
 Christopher Sly, the little tinker, wakes up in a strange bed . 225 
 
 All about us are those richest treasures in our Island crown, our 
 
 gardens ....... (Colour plate) 232 
 
 One of the treasures of the British Museum the beautiful Port- 
 land Vase, probably made in the time of St. Paul, which laid 
 hidden for centuries and has been broken into 150 pieces . 240 
 
 The rare and beautiful works of men gathered from all over the 
 
 world and treasured up in our great museums . . . 241 
 
 One of the lovely things in the treasure-houses of the Island a 
 rare bridal chair from Egypt, made of tens of thousands of 
 beautiful pieces ........ 256 
 
 Of this rare wonder of the world, the tomb of Mausolus, all that 
 
 is left stands in our national treasure-house at Bloomsbury . 257
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Facing pnge 
 
 Back to the little Island the man who won the war comes home 
 
 again (Colour plate) 264 
 
 " If you would touch the very coffin by which stood Rameses the 
 Great, taking leave of his father before they laid him with 
 the long line of Pharaohs, you go to the rare old house of 
 Sir John Soane " . . . . . . . 272 
 
 Little John Ruskin would sit in chapel as still as a mouse, 
 watching the preacher in his high pulpit thumping his velvet 
 cushion 273 
 
 John the Baptist, the splendid picture by Guido Reni in the 
 
 Little Art Gallery at Dulwich . . . . ; i $ 288 
 
 Out of God's country we come into man's town and cross the river 
 where Wren's mighty dome looks down, with its golden cross 
 dazzling in the sun the fairest thing that London's streaming 
 millions look upon ........ 288 
 
 Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, the periwinkle 
 
 trailed its wreaths ; 
 And 'tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. 
 
 (WORDSWORTH.) 
 
 Here in this sequestered close 
 
 Bloom the hyacinth and the rose ; 
 
 Here beside the modest stock , _ 
 
 Flaunts the flaring hollyhock ; 
 
 Here, without a pang, one sees 
 
 Ranks, conditions, and degrees. (AUSTIN DOBSON.) 
 
 I cannot tell what you say, green leaves, I cannot tell what you' 
 
 say : 
 
 But I know that there is a spirit in you, and a word in you this 
 day. (CHARLES KINGSLEY.) 
 
 Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, 
 
 Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
 Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 
 
 Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell. (MATTHEW 
 ARNOLD.) 
 
 Peter Pan, the spirit of eternal youth, at home to his friends near 
 
 the five ponds in Kensington Gardens from 5 to 8.45 . . 304 
 
 The soldier was the sentinel of Europe for a thousand years . . 805 
 
 289 
 
 289
 
 I 
 
 SCENES IN 
 THE STORY OF THE ISLAND
 
 Where shall the watchful sun, 
 England, my England, 
 
 Match the master-work you've done, 
 England, my own ? 
 
 W. E. Henley
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 
 
 FROM my Kent hilltop as I write, blown by the wind 
 that comes in from the North Sea, flies the flag that stirs 
 the world. 
 
 It is red with the blood of heroes, it is blue with the 
 blueness of the sea, it is white as the stainless soul of 
 Justice. It is the flag of the free, the very breath of life 
 to you and me. If alien hands should tear it down, the 
 life we love is at an end. The life we love ! This little 
 land of ours this free, free land; this land so dear 
 throughout the world ! 
 
 We are young ; only a few years have rolled on their 
 way since you and I came upon this fair earth; but 
 England, these islands, this Land of Home, is like an 
 ancient day. For a thousand years and more she has 
 made a way through Time for you and me, and she is not 
 unworthy of the glory of her hills and dales, of the solemn 
 quiet of her long and narrow lanes, of the rolling downs 
 that sweep from the cathedrals to the sea. She is not 
 unworthy of the silver sea that guards her]|body like a 
 wall, for she has set her throne upon the sea and rules 
 it with a sceptre fair to all : the sea that has kept her 
 free she has freely repaid in full. She is not unworthy 
 of the heroes who have died for her ; she is not unworthy 
 of the thousand years of sacrifice, of patient labour, of 
 quenchless hope and loving trust, that have made these 
 islands thrill with pride throughout the centuries.
 
 4 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Before our yeomen cut their bows from the ancient 
 yews still standing at our churchyard gates, before the 
 acorns were dropped in the earth to grow into oaks for 
 our wooden walls, the spirit of freedom found its home 
 in England. The yews and oaks that mark the age-long 
 hours are not so old as English liberty, and our yews and 
 oaks will perish before English liberty dies. Far out into 
 the world it has gone, far and wide to the ends of the 
 earth, so that there is not a free land anywhere, nor a 
 free mind under the sun, that would not suffer if our flag 
 should fall. 
 
 No enemy has ever pulled it down. It has waved on 
 the battlefield that has made men free; it has sheltered 
 the victims of tyrants wherever they have been; it has 
 kindled the fire of heroes who have marched to liberty 
 against great odds. It has been the torch of liberty that 
 nothing could put out. It has been like a fire of freedom 
 sweeping through the ages, or like a wind blowing out of 
 its path whatever hindered the free marching of the 
 human race. 
 
 It is not true that there has never been a stain upon our 
 flag. We are poor, frail, human creatures, and we go 
 astray ; and the nation is merely all of us together. There 
 have been dark days and bad days in the story of our 
 land; there was that dark day, five hundred years ago, 
 when the sun looked down upon the saddest thing our 
 Island ever did, for we burned the Stainless Maid of 
 France. But it is true that this flag of a thousand years 
 is the noblest friend of all mankind that the eyes of a 
 man can look upon. In all the strivings and yearnings of 
 multitudes of men it has been on the side of everlasting 
 Right. In all the long story of the rise of nations it has
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 5 
 
 been on the side of freedom with honour. In the coming 
 up of the world from barbarism to civilisation it has been 
 on the side of humanity. It has cleansed the world from 
 many a foul blot, it has hurled down many a blood- 
 stained power; it has sent many a monstrous crown and 
 sceptre rattling to the dust; it has sown the seed of 
 human freedom, not as in a garden or a little plot of 
 earth, but generously and widely in a boundless land, for 
 all mankind to reap. 
 
 We will guard it well, this flag in whose folds we live; 
 it is woven with the lives of men and women, and many a 
 boy and girl has died to keep it free. Our homeland has 
 not fallen from the skies, like some great blessing for the 
 world direct from heaven. Slowly it has been built up, 
 and many a tale of toil and sorrow our flag tells. " A 
 thousand years scarce serve to form a State," but often 
 we have seen that " an hour may lay it in the dust." 
 For a thousand years, with only a few breaks for a time, 
 the sceptre of England has been in the hands of Egbert's 
 house, but it has been a mighty thing to bring up so 
 great a family. We think of Alfred and are fond of 
 saying that he made our nation for us, but no man 
 made this nation; only growth and Time could solve its 
 problems and bring it strength. 
 
 The village green was the limit of the Anglo-Saxon 
 world; there were no maps to take them farther, no 
 pictures to give them vision, no books to give them thought, 
 no flag to draw them together. A man was a life to 
 himself, as no man can be now, and there was nothing to 
 make him conscious of national existence. 
 
 But it has been the mark of England's greatness that 
 she has taken to herself the best the world could give,
 
 6 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 and given back to the world the best of her own ; and the 
 national spirit came in with the Norman, the only con- 
 queror these islands ever had. A long, slow journey it 
 has been since then, from an England with no English 
 language, from an England with a foreign king, from an 
 England with an enslaved people, to the kingdom of the 
 flag that stirs the world. Think, as you look up at our 
 flag, of the steps by which we came. 
 
 The Norman Conquest did for England what British 
 rule has done for India it drew together the warring 
 factions in the realm and gave them a settled existence. 
 It paved the way for the great achievement of half a 
 century later, when there came about the beginnings of a 
 proper public administration in England, so that fifty 
 years later still 750 years ago an English king was able 
 to assert himself, and by his strong character create an 
 instrument of government that has partly survived till 
 now. The great barons had grown too strong for the 
 national good. They were like so many little kings, each 
 sitting in his castle with almost royal power over the men 
 who tilled his land and responded to his summons if he 
 should call them to arms. 
 
 Almost in the shadow of the flag on my Kent hilltop 
 stands all that is left of one of these seats of power; it 
 stands today, with its bare walls crumbling on the river 
 bank, a remnant of the days of castle rule in England, a 
 monument of nearly a thousand years ago, linking our 
 own days, with their hopes and perils and the beating of 
 the heart of a mighty nation, to the days when these 
 castle walls were the home of the greatest sort of power 
 in England next to the Throne itself. 
 
 The power of the barons was checked in time, and
 
 England had in Henry II. a king who saw that power lay 
 in other things than arms. He took away the power of 
 the barons to call the men to war; he set up courts of 
 justice; he checked the dangerous gathering of power in 
 the hands of lords and priests. He left behind him an 
 instrument for good but he left behind him descendants 
 unfit to use it, so that they seized it for their own 
 ends. 
 
 But the English people never allowed this in the long 
 run; they have put one king to flight and led another to 
 the scaffold for using the crown against the interests of 
 the nation. Nor would they stand the tyranny of King 
 John, who was made to sign Magna Carta, in such a 
 temper that he gnawed bits of stick and straw. Most of 
 us think too much of Magna Carta, which was more a 
 return of power to the barons than a gift to the people, 
 but it was a great foundation to build upon, and 650 years 
 ago a Parliament was established in England by a 
 Frenchman. 
 
 It was the beginning of the real power of the English 
 people ; it developed at last a national feeling ; and in the 
 next hundred years the people realised their power ; trade, 
 politics, and literature grew; and the rise of industry led 
 to the setting up of towns. 
 
 A race that sticks to the land like a limpet, a historian 
 has said, cannot be great, however happy it may be; and 
 the breaking away of the English people from the land 
 was one of their great strides forward. Men came to 
 move about; it was as though Labour was then first 
 mobilised. There were long periods of wars and quarrels 
 for the throne, which do not matter to us now and mat- 
 tered little then; but all the time the English mind was
 
 8 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 broadening, the narrowing power of the priest was broken 
 in the land, and at last came Queen Elizabeth and her 
 Golden Age so great at home that a law was passed for 
 every cottage to have four acres of its own; so great 
 abroad that Drake sailed round the world and broke the 
 tyranny of Spain. Not yet, however, did our flag fly 
 over a single yard of land beyond the English border, 
 and it was not until the last great fight for national free- 
 dom was over, until Charles Stuart had tried and failed 
 to win back the old power of the kings against the people, 
 that Cromwell raised our land so high that it became a 
 great foreign power. 
 
 At home and abroad the great building-up went on. 
 In many a cottage were laid the foundations of that 
 boundless commerce which has made Great Britain the 
 richest country in the world. The little house with its 
 four acres seems to us now, as we look back, a true symbol 
 of the future that was coming, for it was the little centre 
 of agriculture and industry in one, embracing the twin 
 pillars of our national prosperity. While the labourer 
 looked after the farm, his mistress was busy at her 
 spinning wheel and his master at the loom. The produce 
 was sold or consumed, and the cloth was sent on a pack- 
 horse to the fair. 
 
 While industry was thus springing up, the inventor's 
 brain was thinking out machines, the statesmen were 
 making broader laws, and in the end, with Scotland and 
 Ireland to help her, England was great enough to save 
 Europe from Napoleon, and to win the mastery of the 
 seas. Now, for a hundred years, the power of the nation 
 has been slowly rising, until today our British Isles have 
 nearly fifty million loyal people in them, and beyond these
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 9 
 
 islands our flag flies over the lives and homes of 400 
 millions of the human race. 
 
 North and south and east and west it flies, over wide 
 untenanted spaces and over crowded cities, over lands 
 emerging from barbarism and over ancient civilisations. 
 On every continent it floats, over hundreds of tribes and 
 races. Not a church nor a faith is there which is not 
 worshipped under the British flag; not a language known 
 among men which is not spoken somewhere in its 
 shadow. 
 
 Across the hot desert sands of Egypt, over the broad 
 veld of South Africa, through the spacious bushlands of 
 Australia, by the rivers of New Zealand, in the young 
 British Dominions of North America, over the rich cities 
 of India, the sheltering flag floats as the sign of human 
 freedom, and wherever it floats it is loved and cherished 
 as we love and cherish the things that are all in all. 
 
 We have seen what lies behind it in the years that have 
 gone. We can run through the years, in our fancy, and 
 see the striving and fighting, the winning and losing, the 
 labour and sorrow, the long, long hoping and the bitter 
 disappointment, the faith that endured and the patience 
 that conquered. But we can never see the end, for end 
 there is none. The final victory of a nation never comes ; 
 it is always coming. We mount higher and higher, we 
 march forward, we win new conquests; but the end lies 
 always farther on. 
 
 So our flag flies, out of the ages past into the ages 
 coming. It knows no Time; it is always in the sunshine 
 somewhere. And it carries through Time, waving in the 
 skies for all mankind to see, a message of goodwill to all 
 who are free, a message of hope to all who are in chains.
 
 10 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It bears from age to age, as if it were the very breath of 
 it, the everlasting spirit of mankind. 
 
 Nothing less than that it flies for; nothing less than 
 that it is that stirs the hearts of men when they see the 
 red, white, and blue. It is the sign and token that the 
 spirit of liberty lives upon the earth; it is the assurance 
 to the world that mankind shall be enslaved no more. 
 The spirit of the flag is nothing less than that. It stands 
 for what these islands have stood for like a rock throughout 
 the ages, for the right of Liberty and Truth to march 
 wherever they will, hand in hand unhindered. 
 
 This flag that the North Sea wind is blowing what 
 has it done for you and me ? This flag that an alien hand 
 was threatening yesterday what has it done for all 
 mankind ? It has opened the gates of the world to all ; 
 it has opened the door of the human mind. 
 
 When the tyranny of Spain was at its height, when 
 her ships drove other countries from the sea and the 
 Inquisition gripped the human mind as in a vice, the 
 ships that broke her cruel power flew England's flag. It 
 was Francis Drake, stirred to the depths by the insolence 
 of Spain, who laid the tyrant low. It was little England 
 little then indeed who shattered the man who sentenced 
 every Protestant in Holland to be put to death. It was 
 Francis Drake he who climbed a tree in Panama and 
 discovered the Pacific, and prayed that he might sail 
 that sea in an English ship who first sailed round the 
 world and carried our flag with him. 
 
 And in those days, when the power of England was 
 yet dawning, when our ships swept into new ports like 
 stars streaming into new worlds, when our flag flew in 
 the deserts of Asia and the islands of Malay, when our
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 11 
 
 ships sailed up the Bosphoras and into San Francisco, 
 when an English trading company received a charter for 
 India and William Adams of Kent built a navy for Japan, 
 when the greatest victory of the modern world was won 
 at sea by Englishmen in that Golden Age, when England 
 threw open the gates of the world which Spain had locked 
 and barred, England sought no territory, and took for 
 herself not one square foot of soil. It is not true that 
 she wants to own the earth; it is true that she wants to 
 win the earth to Liberty. 
 
 And in that Golden Age, when England opened the 
 gates of the world and freed the seas, she opened the door 
 of the human mind and set it free to grope its way to the 
 light. The strength of Spain decayed with the breaking 
 of her power at sea, and the desolating tyranny of her 
 war against the spread of thought was broken, too. No 
 longer could Spain stop men thinking by pressing the 
 thumbscrew and the rack; no longer was it a crime to 
 dare to seek the truth. Thinking has always led to 
 power, and the men who would keep power in their own 
 hands have always tried to stop it. 
 
 But it is like the stopping of the rolling sea to stop the 
 driving power of thought, and it is the glory of our flag 
 that wherever it flies a man may think the thing he will. 
 Always, throughout our Island story, England has helped 
 the spread of thought and the spread of power; she has 
 been willing for power to spread throughout mankind. 
 She broke the power of Spain that the seas might be free. 
 She broke the power of Napoleon that Europe might be 
 free. She burdened her present and mortgaged her 
 future to stay the hand of the destroyer on a continent 
 of which she did not own enough to dig a grave.
 
 12 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It has not mattered to England where the need and 
 the cry have been; whether some soulless tyrant has 
 devastated the face of some fair region in the depths of 
 Africa; whether a strong Power has bullied a smaller 
 Power that dared to hold up its honest head; whether 
 the sands of the Sudan were running red with blood; 
 whether the glorious inheritance of the millions of India 
 was imperilled by warfare that never ceased : it 
 has mattered nothing where or why the call might 
 come. 
 
 If the hot sun has parched the banks of the Great 
 White Nile until the river of life was dry and famine 
 seized upon the people, the spirit that freed the Sudan 
 from the paralysing grip of the Mahdi sends out its engi- 
 neers to build a dam to hold up the waters and drive 
 back ruin and death from multitudes of lives. If plague 
 strikes terror to the heart of India, the spirit that has 
 brought prosperity to India, and protected its conflicting 
 races, sends out its doctors to give their lives to save the 
 people. If a native population is attacked by some 
 mysterious disease, the spirit that sacrifices without flinch- 
 ing goes out and knows no rest until the enemy is found 
 and conquered. 
 
 It is the spirit of the flag. It is the spirit of the plague- 
 stricken village which shut itself off from the world until 
 the plague consumed it; the spirit of the men of the 
 Birkenhead who put the women and children in the boats 
 and went down into the sea saluting England; the spirit 
 of Bede, who hastened with his translation of St. John 
 lest his breath should be gone before he finished it; of 
 Kate Barlass, who bolted the door with her arm against 
 the enemy ; of a countless host of men and women and
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 13 
 
 children who have lived and died for England's sake, and 
 whose names shine for ever as stars in the sky. 
 
 What is it that they lived and died for? What is it 
 our flag flies for? What is it that stirs the blood of a 
 hero so that he would die to save the flag from stain ? 
 It is the something in us all that has come to us from we 
 know not where, that has grown in us we know not how, 
 because it is the very soul of the land we love. It is the 
 invisible fountain from which a nation's greatness springs. 
 
 It is the something that made Alfred love the truth, 
 that moved Sir Francis Drake to finish the game before 
 he beat the Spaniards, that kept alive the pride of Walter 
 Raleigh in a traitor's cell, that put in Shakespeare's hand 
 the power the world can never take away, that touched 
 the mind of Milton with the glow of Paradise, that lit 
 the fire in Cromwell's soul, that stirred the vision of John 
 Bunyan, that nerved John Hampden to resist a lawless 
 king. Ib is the something that moved the men of Crom- 
 well's army who never lost a fight, that gave to England 
 in her hour of need the three stout hearts of Wellington 
 and Nelson and Pitt, that touched the heart of William 
 Wilberforce and would not let him rest until the slaves 
 were free, that went out from the lighthouse with Grace 
 Darling, that haunted the beds of wounded men with 
 Florence Nightingale. It is the something that language 
 has not yet found words for, this spirit that our men are 
 ever dying for, this spirit that our flag is ever flying for. 
 
 It flies for all those things that have built up, out of 
 the warring peoples of Alfred's day, the great ruling race 
 of the world. It flies for the spirit that runs through the 
 woof and texture of the English-speaking race. It flies 
 for the government of the people, for the people, by the
 
 14 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 people, and for the greatest good of the greatest number. 
 It flies for liberty for all who are able to use it and will 
 not abuse it, and for guiding all others along the road 
 that leads to it. 
 
 It flies for the Open Door a fair field and equal rights 
 for all nations. 
 
 It flies for the gospel that the labourer is worthy of 
 his hire, and that men shall not be slaves. 
 
 It flies for humanity in all things ; for the stopping of 
 cruelty everywhere, for kindness to animals, for the love 
 of little children. 
 
 It flies for the honour of the spoken and written 
 word throughout the world. 
 
 It flies for throwing open as wide as can be the field 
 of human knowledge. 
 
 It flies for spreading as wide as can be the field of 
 human happiness. 
 
 It flies for letting the truth be free as life itself. 
 
 It flies for the toleration of every man's opinion. 
 
 It flies for the unselfish pursuit of the good of all 
 mankind. 
 
 It flies for the peace of all the world, which no nation 
 ever longed for more. 
 
 All these things we read in the flag that flies in the 
 four winds of heaven, and those who truly love our flag 
 love these things too, for they are the living spirit of our 
 race. From these islands to the ends of the earth this 
 spirit has gone out, and nothing has been able to destroy 
 it. It has gone into strange lands, it has been alone in 
 the wilderness ; but it has found its way and won. It has 
 found itself crushed for a time in the very home in which 
 it grew, and it has gone out to find new lands where it 
 could thrive.
 
 THE FLAG THAT STIRS THE WORLD 15 
 
 Driven from the Old World, it built up the New. 
 The spirit that built up our little Island Home cemented 
 the foundations of America, the greatest Commonwealth 
 the world has ever seen. It is not as quick as lightning, 
 but it is slow and sure. It sets out and gets there. It is 
 not as scientific as Sir Joseph Thomson's laboratory, but 
 it muddles through and wins. It has the patience that 
 knows that the dream must come true. It endures to 
 the end. It cares not who dies if Freedom lives. 
 
 It has given to the world a glory that will never fade. 
 There is a glory of the sun, and a glory of the moon, and 
 there is the glory of England. Greece and Rome have 
 passed away, but England will endure. She has been 
 true to her thousand years of heroes ; she has used nobly 
 the power that came into her hands. Without one drop 
 of blood she freed the slaves. She helped to keep Greece 
 free. She helped the persecuted Huguenots. She gave 
 strength to the Belgian people in their fight for indepen- 
 dence. She helped the Liberal cause in Spain with ten 
 thousand volunteers. She helped to break the Spanish 
 yoke in South America. She helped to tear the grip of 
 kings from Italy's throat, and gave heart to Garibaldi 
 and Cavour in making Italy strong and free. She found 
 the money for all who would to fight against Napoleon, 
 and when other countries failed she fought Napoleon 
 alone and broke his power at last. 
 
 She saved Europe long ago; she saved Europe in 
 these bitter years through which we all have lived; and 
 she yet will save the world. She will keep the flag of 
 Liberty waving in the four corners of the earth and in 
 every sea. It is not for nothing that her quenchless 
 spirit has gone out and that the work of her hand never
 
 16 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 sleeps. It is not for nothing that the sun never sets 
 upon the banner of this ancient land. 
 
 Proud and high it flies on my Kent hilltop. A 
 thousand years and more of England's story is here 
 about its base, for it rests in a bed of Roman bricks from 
 a Roman governor's house behind the hill : out of a bit 
 of the Roman Empire flies the flag of an empire such as 
 Caesar never knew. It has the touch of Alfred's England, 
 for it is fastened to a piece of oak that was growing when 
 Alfred laid the first keels of our English ships. It has the 
 mark of Parliament upon it, for nailed to its post is a 
 piece of the ancient roof of Westminster Hall, beneath 
 which there grew up that power of England which broke 
 the might of Spain. And it has the touch of the spirit 
 of Francis Drake, for beneath it lies a cannon-ball from a 
 Spanish ship which Drake drummed up the Channel 
 long ago. 
 
 And so the flag flies high. Out of the historic past it 
 flies, waving in the wind that blows across the seas. In 
 its sheltering freedom lives one quarter of mankind; on 
 its side in these great days we have seen the power of 
 those who saved the world. But more than all that is 
 outside it, more than all the men and ships and guns, 
 more than all the vast immensities of empire that assemble 
 underneath the flag, is the deathless spirit in its folds 
 which no power on earth can break. It is as old as the 
 hills, as everlasting as the sun, and it will not fail us now.
 
 THE FLAG-FROM THE PAINTING BY MR. T. C. GOTCH 
 
 Page 3
 
 ta*iliur, " ii " ill IT ^11 1 
 
 IT IS NOT TRUE TO SAY THERE ARE NO BLOTS UPON OUR FLAG-THE SADDEST THING 
 THE ISLAND EVER DID WAS TO BURN THIS STAINLESS MAID 
 
 Reproduced by permission of the Autotype Fine Art Company 
 
 \See Page 4
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 
 
 OLDER than the solid earth are the rivers of the Island. 
 The oldest thing men's hands have touched is the liquid 
 beauty that dazzles with new life at every rising of the sun. 
 
 Like a vision of eternal youth our little river runs 
 past, gliding by the foot of the hill, through the meadows 
 and under the bridges, going where it will go, stopping 
 for nobody, caring for nothing. The memories of a 
 hundred thousand years are in its quiet flow; the power 
 of mighty engines is pent up in its depths. For age after 
 age it has worn away the earth and never worn itself; 
 it has used its power and never lost it. It is not true 
 that you cannot turn the mill-wheel with the water that 
 has passed, for the water will come back bringing the same 
 power, never spent and never tired, fresh and strong to 
 drive the mill again. Only you must wait, perhaps a 
 hundred thousand years. 
 
 Time is nothing to the river. The fishes play in its 
 sparkling waters. The roses grow in the gardens on its 
 banks. The wheat bends down in its meadows until it 
 almost breaks. The boys splash and bathe in the running 
 stream, and old men sit on its banks and think of all 
 that their lives have been. But fishes come and go, and 
 roses fade, wheat is made into flour and flour into living 
 men; and boys grow old, and old men pass away; yet on 
 
 and on the river flows, the only thing that always moves, 
 c 17
 
 18 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It has been flowing since we can remember, since 
 Kent became a kingdom and England a nation; it was 
 flowing, perhaps, before there was a child in the Island 
 to play on its banks. It knew the earth as we have never 
 known it; it saw the Alps when they stretched from 
 Switzerland to England; it has seen the grinding of the 
 hills and the laying of the plain. For thousands of 
 years it has rolled on its way, wearing down and building 
 up, carrying in its bed from place to place the materials 
 that shaped the countryside anew, and built up the 
 landscapes that we love to see. 
 
 It held within its depths, through all these centuries, 
 the power that was to change the modern world the 
 drop of water that was to meet with fire and drive our 
 engines. It flowed, perhaps, by the first fires that were 
 lit in the Island, but the day of the great meeting was not 
 yet ; the ages of the world rolled past, and the river kept 
 its secret still. Empires were to rise and fall before man 
 was to discover that a drop of water, heated by fire, needs 
 1700 times its space to hold it; and with that discovery 
 the water that had carved the valleys and washed away 
 the hills was to carve out the destinies of men. Fire 
 and water were to send our trains over land and drive 
 our ships over sea; fire and water were to be the kings 
 of the Age of Power. 
 
 And a fitting alliance it was, for the partnership between 
 fire and water is the oldest partnership upon the earth. 
 It was the first unlimited company ever formed. From 
 the sea to the sun, from the sun to the sea that is the 
 song of the waters; and on this ceaseless round, rising 
 towards the sun as vapour and mist and cloud, falling to 
 the earth as rain and snow and hail, the waters have done
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 19 
 
 their share of the carving and shaping of the earth, and 
 of the furnishing of the world as the home of men. So 
 that our river takes us, when we let our fancies free, 
 down through the ages and up to the sun. 
 
 We will walk by a small and quiet river, not by the 
 rushing waters that come up out of the past like some 
 huge giant with his hammer and axe. We will watch 
 the spring that bursts open its prison gates in a beautiful 
 park in Kent, and follow it to the river on which London 
 stands. We shall go but twenty miles, but half of it 
 will be as beautiful as any miles of English earth, and all 
 of it will speak to us of the historic past. Along these 
 green banks has moved through century after century, 
 part of the great procession of a nation's life. 
 
 A quiet and gentle stream the Darent is today, gliding 
 slowly through hamlets and meadows and lanes, seeking 
 out the little places, and nowhere touching the busy 
 world until it runs through Dartford to the Thames. 
 Its reverence for the past is seen in its winding ways. 
 Through the silent ruin of the Past it goes, with only 
 the softest murmuring as it creeps by the little church 
 towers it knew in other days. Still it ripples and glides 
 between the banks on which it has seen its proud share 
 of our Island story, but it treasures its secrets in the quiet 
 places, whispering them to ancient trees that stand aloof, 
 to castle walls where sounds of life have long been stilled, 
 to the bishop's palace now overgrown with ivy, to the 
 spirit of the early Britons whose Jbones lie scattered here, 
 to the home of the Roman soldiers which still lies hidden 
 under one of its green banks. 
 
 And so a walk by the Darent is a pleasant thing, 
 through twenty miles of lovely England and twenty
 
 20 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 centuries of time. Through a hundred centuries indeed, 
 imagination flies as we stand in its beautiful valley, 
 widening out until the heights of the wooded hills are 
 more than a mile apart. Once upon a time the Darent 
 ran up there; this silver stream, winding its way so 
 quietly now that we almost lose it, must have been a 
 mighty river then. Farther back than the mind can 
 think perhaps a million years ago when the Giant 
 Sloth was still eating the tops of trees and the three-toed 
 horse was with him, when the great mass of chalk which 
 stretched from the North Downs to the sea had not yet 
 been washed away, streams of water poured down from 
 the mountains of Kent, carving out tiny valleys wherever 
 they could find a way, and joining at last, after age upon 
 age, in the largest stream of all, the river by which we 
 are walking now. 
 
 So the Darent began its excavation of the valley 
 which has been the scene of the lives of generations of 
 men, the workshop of the Stone Age men, the camping- 
 ground of Roman soldiers, the battlefields of Danes and 
 Saxons, the processional way of priests and kings, and, 
 above all, the homeland of a multitude of those simple 
 people whose lives make up the story of the Island. 
 We can trace the history of the river still at the heights 
 where it began; out of my window on the hilltop, as I 
 sit writing this, is the bank of gravel the Darent left 
 behind on its way down the hill. It is the signature of 
 the river written when the mammoth and the mastodon 
 were passing by. 
 
 In my wood lie the relics of the men who saw them 
 passing the stone tools they made, the hollowed-out 
 stones from which they drank the cool water of the Darent ;
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 21 
 
 the very stones they chipped and shaped to look like 
 faces. 
 
 A wood is a lovely place to dream in; but a wood is a 
 thrilling place to be in when we pick up in it something 
 a man made a hundred thousand years ago. There it 
 has lain while the world has changed, while the mammoth 
 and the cave bear have passed out of the world, while 
 the hills have been worn down to dust, while civilisation 
 has been built up. It was handled, it may be, by men 
 who could get no food until they had killed a lion, who 
 shaped these stones to throw at wild beasts in the great 
 forests that covered this part of Europe for over a hundred 
 miles. 
 
 We are in a world of wonder in the Darent Valley, 
 could we read the book that lies open to our eyes. Hun- 
 dreds of thousands of tools there must be, preserved here 
 by the river drift, or brought here by the melting of the 
 ice which covered Europe to a depth of hundreds of feet. 
 We can only guess if there were men in Kent in the 
 days before the glaciers filled the Darent Valley, but we 
 know that there were men here, making arrowheads and 
 hammerheads, sharpening knives of stone, boring holes 
 in wood, clothing themselves in the skins of beasts, 
 fashioning ornaments for their wives, and polishing 
 pebbles and making necklaces of pretty stones for their 
 children, when the Darent ran 150 feet above its present bed. 
 We know it because it is written in the book of the river. 
 
 And we know that these rough men who lived by the 
 Darent then had the love of something more than killing 
 wild beasts with sharpened flints. They were short 
 men, no doubt, with low foreheads and heavy jaws, 
 gorilla-like men with bushy hair and pointed ears and
 
 22 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 chins that sloped backward from the teeth, and they had 
 enough to do to think of the things of the moment and 
 the dangers that surrounded them in days when the wild 
 beasts of Europe had a highway from Russia to Kent; 
 but a love of beauty was growing in them even then. It 
 is seen in every kind of legacy they left behind on the 
 river banks. We see it in the gems of shaped and polished 
 stone that are fit to hang in a Bond Street window. We 
 see it in the high finish they gave to stone tools that would 
 have served their purpose in the roughest state. They 
 are the oldest work of men still existing in the world, 
 and it is pleasant to think that they were often beauti- 
 fully made. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no more striking collection of 
 natural things in England than these relics of the men 
 of the Darent Valley. Our knowledge of the past grows 
 slowly, and is gathered under great difficulties; and 
 though nobody questions the tools themselves there are 
 still those who maintain that there is no love of art in 
 these precious stones. But it is hard not to believe in 
 the artists of the Darent. 
 
 If time should prove that all these stones were shaped 
 by accident, then it will be incredible that so many acci- 
 dents of the same kind can have happened in the same 
 place. For there has been found in the old Darent bed, 
 by one of the most patient of all our scientific English- 
 men, a collection of images in stone which suggest human 
 intention hardly less than some of the sculptures in a 
 modern museum. For twenty years Mr. W. M. Newton 
 has given his leisure hours to the gravel drift of the Darent, 
 a few miles from the Thames, as our immortal village 
 grocer, Mr. Benjamin Harrison, has given half a century
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 23 
 
 to picking up stones at Ightham, turning over the pages 
 of human history perhaps a million years ago. Mr. 
 Harrison is over the hills; Mr. Newton is on our river 
 bank; and here we have to do with the witnesses Mr. 
 Newton has found from the Darent. He has moved 
 thousands of tons of gravel. It is a great piece of work 
 for the pure love of knowledge, and the time will come 
 when another age will do Mr. Newton justice, as one of 
 the patient and most unwearying workers in the field 
 Mr. Harrison has opened up. What he has around him 
 now is as curious a collection of faces and figures as could 
 well be brought together. We may call them a Stone 
 Age Art Gallery, for these figures are, if Mr. Newton is 
 right, nothing less than the first attempts of mankind at 
 sculpture, and his precious stones of the Darent are nothing 
 more nor less than the oldest sculpture gallery in the land. 
 We can imagine the joy the chipping of these stones 
 would bring into a household of the Stone Age. There 
 was little enough to interest the people then, except the 
 strain of the struggle for life itself. Ever on the watch 
 a man must be, ever anxious for his return would be the 
 wife he had left behind; and we read their fear of the 
 great world beyond their own hillside in the clever homes 
 they sometimes made on lakes or up in trees. The finding 
 of a curious stone, that looked like a face and could be 
 chipped to look like it still more, would be a thing to delight 
 in then, and the children would press round the father 
 as he took up his flint knife, or his scratcher, or his borer, 
 and did in his own way what Michael Angelo was to do 
 in his great way when another hundred thousand years 
 had gone. If a stone had a natural chip in a certain 
 place, a chip with a flint would balance it, and lo ! there
 
 24 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 would be two eyes ; another chip would shape a nose, and 
 a final chip would give the mouth. So there would come 
 into the world, partly by man's skill and partly by 
 nature's forces, the first expression of the human mind 
 in stone. So, no doubt, man would learn the need for 
 finer tools than those he used for hunting beasts. 
 
 There are those who say they are accidental markings, 
 but there were those who said that men would never fly, 
 and there are still poor people who believe the earth is 
 flat. We must believe our own eyes. In this Stone Age 
 Gallery are hundreds of stones that have been chipped, 
 says Mr. Newton, partly by chance and partly by hand, 
 with the clear suggestion that the Stone Age man, finding 
 a stone with some likeness to a face, chipped it to complete 
 the likeness. Here an eye, and here a mouth, and the 
 Stone Age man had a precious treasure to take home one 
 day. Sometimes there would be a sense of humour and 
 a comical expression, sometimes there would be a striking 
 attitude, as of an animal looking round; sometimes the 
 figure is a fish, or a bird, or a reptile; and sometimes a 
 flint has been cut in two to bring out a good profile por- 
 trait. We must leave them all, believing them, if we will, 
 to be accidents, or believing them, if we will, to be portraits 
 from the Stone Age. It must surely be that our chil- 
 dren's children will see them in some museum as evidence 
 of the first yearnings of mankind for making pictures of 
 the things about them. 
 
 So our river, spanning earth and sky in its dependence 
 on the sun, spans human time itself in the life of its 
 banks. It came down from the mountains that have dis- 
 appeared; it may have started on its work, for all we 
 know, before men were yet upon the earth. Certain we
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 25 
 
 are that the earliest men we know came here; here made 
 their homes, here hunted in great forests, here lived their 
 day and died. By the little friendly river, sheltered by 
 the friendly hills, the men of the old days would dwell. 
 
 As the years rolled by, as the Darent rolled on, men 
 found fire and metals, and a new age of wonder opened 
 on our river banks. The Stone Age was ended; the 
 Bronze Age was begun. The old, old tales that the poets 
 have found in the treasuries that only poets know tell 
 us of the early days of bronze and iron, when men no 
 longer made their tools of stone, but fashioned iron 
 cauldrons, enamelled the hilts of swords, coloured their 
 sharp iron spears, painted their gorgeous shields; and 
 one tale tells of men who went long journeys plying a 
 skilful craft, selling saddles so beautiful that " none could 
 be sold but theirs " ; making shoes of hide that all who 
 could afford were glad to buy. It was the dawn of 
 commerce in the Island. 
 
 The dark Iberian came here, the first of all the immi- 
 grants we know to reach these islands; and after him 
 came the conquering Celt, who had learned to master all 
 the animals we use today, and to use them all except 
 perhaps the pig and the bee. The fair Celt and the dark 
 Iberian laid for our England the foundations of great 
 prosperity. Cattle and wheat and barley they had in 
 abundance; and life had moved a long way forward by 
 the river Darent before the next men came. 
 
 Men were no longer in fear of animals at every step 
 they took outside their habitations; the finding of iron 
 was the finding of power, and at last man was master 
 of the beast. The little wave of immigration that had 
 reached here from the Continent brought with it a new
 
 26 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 chapter in our Island story; we may call the fair Celt 
 and the dark Iberian the founders of our social life. 
 
 And after them, long after them, came other men : 
 the Roman Empire reached out to the Darent, and sent 
 its sentinels to hold our river for Caesar; a lovely coin 
 of Constantine my gardener's spade turned up the other 
 day, dropped by some Roman soldier fifteen centuries 
 ago. There have been found in fields through which the 
 Darent runs coins of the first century of our Christian 
 Era that may have been spent, perhaps, when Paul was 
 alive. But the most precious thing of all that we know 
 the Darent holds in its keeping is the house of a Roman 
 Governor, the proud seat of an ambassador of Caesar. 
 You will not find it as you walk by the. Darent now, but 
 you will wonder, perhaps, as you come to Darenth village, 
 what the green mounds mean in the field where the gipsies 
 camp. They cover the ruins of the greatest Roman house 
 that has yet been found in England. 
 
 It is odd to imagine, on the banks of our quiet river, 
 the pageantry that must have upheld the prestige of the 
 Roman Empire here. A proud man the Roman must 
 have been as he stood by the silver stream and looked out 
 on the fair face of Rome's new colony. Behind him, as 
 he looked across the Darent, was a massive pile of Roman 
 bricks, with an unbroken line of rooms reaching for 
 450 feet, many of the rooms with painted walls. Some of 
 the walls were four feet thick, faced with tiles; one 
 room was 50 feet from end to end; there were separate 
 living-rooms for summer and winter; and the floors were 
 raised on hollow tiles which carried the heat from the 
 furnace-rooms beneath. Flue pipes in the walls carried 
 the fumes and smoke from the furnace to the roof, and
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 27 
 
 so well conceived was the building that a wall 340 feet 
 long was made to keep back the river in time of flood. 
 
 Here, in this pleasant place which is now a silent 
 countryside, was a seat of Roman power in England; 
 under our feet lie its ruins. The massive foundations are 
 all that is left of this scene of Roman pomp, but the earth 
 has preserved them through the centuries as strong and 
 perfect as the day they were built, so that some of these 
 Roman bricks are built into my house today. The 
 mortar is still firm, the bricks are still intact, the little 
 inch-tiles of the tesselated pavement are still in their 
 place. Our English earth holds them fast, as it held the 
 fragments of one of the first panes of window glass ever 
 found in England, rescued from these ruins when the 
 foundations were uncovered years ago. Men found the 
 coins of twenty Roman emperors, with things of use 
 from the Roman kitchen and things of beauty from my 
 lady's boudoir. The soot from the underground fires was 
 still on the floor when the earth was dug away a strange 
 memory, through all the centuries, of the last night when 
 the fires burned in this great place. 
 
 The fires went out for ever when the Romans went 
 away. After three hundred years of Roman govern- 
 ment the land had settled down. Now the echo of the 
 tramping of invaders was heard in the deserted halls; 
 the Roman house at Darenth crumbled like the Roman 
 Forum; and around it, on all hands, came wanderers 
 from afar. A fine place the pirates found our England 
 when the Romans went away; up the Thames to London 
 they made their way, and along the Stour, the Medway, 
 and the Darent into the heart of Kent. The heyday of 
 the pirates was long and bitter for the Island folk, and it
 
 28 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 was, perhaps, the saddest chapter of the life of our 
 river. 
 
 The Picts had come down from the North, breaking 
 over the Roman Wall; the Scots burst down upon the 
 country from the West; Jutes and Saxons seized the 
 eastern coast. The troubled waters of the Darent ran 
 through many a battlefield for a dozen generations, 
 treason and hatred destroyed the unity of the British 
 people, and for hundreds of years the land the Romans 
 had left was afflicted with wars and turmoil. Its relics, 
 if we could find them now, would be broken towers and 
 ruined churches ; its diaries, if we could read them, would 
 tell of slaughter without pity, and of dead men left 
 unburied in the fields to be devoured by beasts; its chief 
 figures were the tribal kings who fought for the power 
 the Romans had thrown down. We read of Hengist and 
 Horsa coming up from the South, leading the conquering 
 Jutes, and we know that it was almost within sound of 
 our rippling river, about the time of which the King 
 Arthur legends tell, that the British resistance to their 
 invaders was at its height. But we know, too, that 
 nothing could drive back the Jutes, the Saxons, and the 
 English, and that at last the people settled down in peace 
 to build up what is now the English nation. Caring 
 nothing for the distant memory of the Roman rule, or 
 forgetting it altogether, they pulled down or burned down 
 whatever was left of it. 
 
 On the banks of the Darent there rose up the home- 
 steads of the new English people the gentleman's house 
 with the long low roof, enclosed within a stockade, and a 
 few dozen wattle huts for the bondsmen who worked the 
 land. So the new England arose, and there was nothing
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 29 
 
 about which the people cared less than they cared about 
 what remained of Rome. They pulled down Roman 
 temples and built their houses with the bricks, and in 
 the valley of the Darent the whole of the great Roman 
 house, except the foundations, was carried away. The 
 river still flows past some of the remains, but they are 
 built into the strong flint walls of little churches, espe- 
 cially in the church close by the Roman field. The valley 
 has no more lovely monument than Darenth church, its 
 ancient walls repaired with the bricks of pagan Rome, its 
 quaint chancel with a sealed-up chamber over it, its font 
 carved by Norman hands, its rugged tower taking us 
 back, we may well believe, to the days when the river still 
 bore away the plunder of the Roman house. 
 
 But we must leave the monuments of the valley and 
 all the treasures it has stored up through the ages : what 
 of this river of ours ? 
 
 From time beyond reckoning we have followed it, to 
 the dawn of the national history in which it has played 
 its part. We can only think for a moment how proud its 
 part has been. The little spring in Squerryes Park at 
 Westerham has justified itself abundantly through the 
 long years in which it has poured its volume into the 
 Thames. It has been worthy of the dignity of its birth 
 and of its noble entrance to the sea. The heavy timbers 
 and arches of Squerryes, its walled-up cupboards and 
 hidden doors, bring back old England to our minds, and 
 of one old chestnut-tree that shades the approach to this 
 great house it has been said that it must surely have 
 sheltered the wolf and the wild boar. 
 
 Under these trees, on the shady banks of the Darent, 
 the boy who grew up to win Quebec and found the British
 
 30 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Empire in North America played in his youth, and received 
 his commission as a soldier; the thought of this rippling 
 river must often have been with General Wolfe as he fought 
 for England and thought of home. Not far on the journey 
 beginning at the home of Wolfe, the river passes through 
 a battlefield of King Canute, after whose fight at Otford 
 nine hundred years ago the Darent " ran red with Danish 
 blood." Near this same battleground was lost a battle 
 which ended the kingdom of Kent older than the Empire 
 of Rome and joined up Kent with the English nation; 
 and here, to the palace whose walls still stand on this 
 ground so sacred in our history, came Thomas Becket and 
 Cardinal Wolsey and Henry the Eighth, all of them loving 
 the pleasant stream of which Spenser wrote, " Still Darent, 
 in whose waters clear ten thousand fishes play." Here 
 stands still the old tower in which Cranmer wrote the Book 
 of Common Prayer. 
 
 Through scenes like these the Darent flows, past houses 
 that have been inhabited since England had a Parliament, 
 past churches in which simple men and women have 
 gathered for eight hundred years. It runs under the old 
 bridge on which the people stood to hear John Wesley 
 preach, close by the cottage built when Queen Elizabeth 
 was on the throne and Sir Walter Raleigh was on the sea. 
 It runs by the church, in Dartford's old street, where lies 
 the man who brought to England the first lime trees and 
 perhaps the first paper; it runs under three railways 
 to the last home of one of the first railway dreamers, 
 poor Richard Trevithick, who, while George Stephenson 
 was hoeing turnips, was running a steam carriage late at 
 night in the country lanes of our Island, but met with 
 no reward except to be snatched from a pauper's grave
 
 THE TALE THE RIVER TELLS 31 
 
 by the men with whom he had worked as a Dartford 
 engineer. It runs past ruined castle walls, by gardens in 
 which children played when Charles the First was young. 
 It ripples through the fields in which the common founders 
 of our English nation sleep. It runs by tiny churches 
 until its waters join the river that glides in the shadow 
 of St. Paul's. It flows by the silent emblems of the far-off 
 past to within sound of the city where the life of men 
 is never still. 
 
 It runs, our little river, throughout the life of the 
 world. It has known the distant past with all its ancient 
 glory; it helps to make the newspapers of the present, 
 with all their modern story. And it flows, within its 
 green and peaceful banks, out into the bustle of the wide, 
 wide world, until it joins the mighty river and the boundless 
 ocean. 
 
 Its memory is laden with the wonder of our island 
 home; its destiny is mingled with the sea that keeps 
 us free.
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 
 TO THE ISLAND 
 
 THE sweetest sound that ever reached the Island came 
 from the pleasant land of Galilee. 
 
 Quite when and how it came we do not know, but the 
 news that the Light of the World had dawned on Beth- 
 lehem can hardly have been long on its way. It would 
 travel to Rome, and from Rome to Britain, and it is even 
 possible that a traveller who had looked upon the face of 
 Jesus in Jerusalem may actually have reached our shores. 
 
 There are those who believe that Paul himself came to 
 England, and the legend still lives that Joseph of Ari- 
 mathea, who laid the body of Jesus in the tomb, planted 
 a thorn that flourishes at Glastonbury. What we know 
 to be true is that Christianity came here in those very 
 early years, almost certainly before the last man who saw 
 the Crucifixion could have died. 
 
 That we may be almost sure of from one fact alone, a 
 fact we may remember with a thrill. It may or may not 
 be true that the Apostles came to Britain, but more 
 deeply fascinating still is that picture of a lady of Britain 
 who is mentioned in the Bible, to whom Paul, in writing 
 to Timothy, sent his greetings. She was Claudia, wife of 
 Pudens, and their house was open to Paul and the believers 
 in those days when to believe brought ridicule and peril. 
 We may stand today in Rome in the house of this British 
 
 32
 
 SIR FRANCIS DRAKE CLIMBS UP INTO A TREE AND DISCOVERS THE PACIFIC. PRAYING 
 THAT THE DAY MAY COME WHEN HE MAY SAIL THAT SEA IN AN ENGLISH SHIP 
 
 [See Page 10
 
 A GLORY OF THE ISLAND THAT HAS STOOD 700 YEARS-SALISBURY CATHEDRAL 
 PAINTED BY CONSTABLE THE MASTER ARTIST OF OUR COUNTRYSIDE 
 
 AS
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 33 
 
 lady ; and her praises as an English matron in Rome were 
 sung in English poetry over eighteen centuries ago. We 
 may be sure she would be with those who visited Paul in 
 his prison cell, where the captive conqueror of the human 
 mind talked freely with the Roman soldiers standing by. 
 
 So that, even had there been neither traders nor 
 soldiers to bring the news of Christianity to Britain, there 
 was Claudia, and we may be sure that, holding the fort 
 for Paul in Rome, this great lady would not have left her 
 friends at home in ignorance of what had happened in a 
 far-off Roman province. For the first three hundred 
 years we know little or nothing the world moved slowly 
 then; but when the fourth century opened there were 
 British bishops present at a Council in France, and a 
 historian writing at that time speaks plainly of some of 
 the Apostles having been to Britain. 
 
 So it is not true that Augustine first brought Chris- 
 tianity to the British people, as many people still believe ; 
 it had been there for centuries when he came, and one of 
 the first problems Augustine had to settle was what to 
 do with the British bishops. Even then there were 
 separate and rival churches in the four points of the 
 compass; even then the churches were governed in 
 anything but the spirit of the Prince of Peace. 
 
 The bishops were obstinate and Augustine was stupid, 
 and they met like enemies at war at the extreme western 
 point of the kingdom of Kent. In the end the British 
 bishops consulted an old man full of wisdom, who told 
 them that if Augustine came to them like a gentleman, 
 generously and with plain goodwill, they should make 
 peace with him ; but if Augustine received them haughtily, 
 sitting in his seat, they should have nothing to do with
 
 34 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 him. Augustine remained seated, and the war in the 
 Church went on. 
 
 But it is true that the coming of Augustine was a 
 landmark in the story of the Island. One of the first 
 stories we learn at school tells of this time. It is of a 
 Roman market-place in which some little English boys 
 were being sold as slaves. Rome at the height of her 
 glory was not too proud to build up its pleasures on 
 slavery as Athens had done, and when the demand for 
 slaves was no longer met by captives brought home from 
 the wars there was a regular traffic in slaves between 
 Britain and Rome. On the day of which our story tells 
 English merchants stood in Rome, selling English boys, 
 when Gregory passed through the market-place. 
 
 The bright faces of our island boys must have pleased 
 him, for Gregory asked what race they were, and on 
 being told that they were Angles he said that they were 
 fit to be made angels; and he resolved to make them so. 
 Gregory had power in Rome, for he was one day to be 
 Pope; and he bought these boys and taught them, 
 training them as missionaries. He ordered other boys to 
 be bought for him in England and sent out to Rome, and 
 at last this Pope who loved our boys, buying them as 
 slaves to send them back free to their homeland with the 
 great news from Galilee, sent Augustine into Kent and 
 laid the foundation of one of the noblest temples that 
 have ever been set up on the face of the earth, that glory 
 of our Island which for centuries has brought travellers 
 to the pleasant town of Canterbury. 
 
 Augustine came from Rome to a kingdom that had 
 once been a province of Rome, but after the Romans had 
 left, having ruled here for three or four hundred years,
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 35 
 
 the Church that had been slowly growing up was almost 
 blotted out. The clergy lived evil lives, and plague at 
 last swept most of them away ; Saxons would steal across 
 the North Sea and slay British priests at the altar; the 
 priests fled to the mountains or were murdered in heaps; 
 and when Augustine came he found Christianity struggling 
 for its breath in Britain, holding up its head here and 
 there, but in peril of being entirely swept away. 
 
 But there were on the side of Christianity in those dark 
 days two noble women, a mother and her daughter, and 
 they are among the rarest figures in all our Island story. 
 One was Bertha, wife of Ethelbert, the King of Kent; 
 the other was her daughter Ethelburga, wife of Edwin, 
 who ruled from Yorkshire to the Forth. Both their kings 
 were pagans, but these queens welcomed the good tidings 
 that Augustine brought anew, and in those early years of 
 the seventh century the most dramatic thing in the history 
 of our Island was the dauntless chivalry of these two 
 women. They never wearied in well-doing ; they believed 
 in those who brought the glad tidings; and they threw 
 all the quiet power that a queen can wield, all the devotion 
 that a woman can cherish, on the side of the invisible God 
 and against the visible gods of wood and stone to which 
 their lords bowed down. 
 
 Ethelbert listened to Augustine and believed, and 
 there stands to this day in Canterbury, priceless among the 
 treasures of our land, that little church of St. Martin 
 which Bertha restored the first English queen to build 
 a church, the oldest English church of which we know. 
 
 But Edwin came slowly out of his old ways. He was 
 the great king who founded Edinburgh, and was not 
 easily persuaded to give up his old powers; but he loved
 
 36 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 the daughter of Queen Bertha, and it was made a con- 
 dition when he married her that he should not be obstinate 
 concerning the new religion, and should not shut the gate 
 against it. The day came when he had a great battle to 
 fight, and in a critical hour King Edwin promised that if 
 he won the battle he would cast off his idols. He won, 
 and the solemn time had come. 
 
 But it is hard to cast down idols, to break a habit 
 woven through our lives, and Edwin would sit alone often 
 and long by day, and would lie awake at night, thinking. 
 Every influence for good was brought to bear upon him. 
 The Pope sent him a letter from Rome, and sent to his 
 wife a silver mirror and an ivory comb inlaid with gold. 
 He sent also Paulinus, a bishop whose eloquence he 
 hoped might persuade the King; but still Edwin held 
 out, and at last they called a solemn council of the wise 
 men of the realm. They were to decide for Northumbria 
 the question that Constantine had decided for Rome 
 whether the worship of the idols should be abandoned in 
 the kingdom and the worship of the invisible God should 
 take its place. 
 
 Thirteen centuries have passed away since then, and 
 many solemn spectacles our Island has seen; but which 
 among them all is half so moving to us now as this Great 
 Council of Northumbria, accepting or rejecting God? 
 The everlasting treasure of our English books has been 
 built up since then, but where, in any page in any one of 
 them, is a story more lovely than that of the wise old 
 counsellor who seems to have swayed the anxious King, 
 to have sounded the death-knell of the idols, and to have 
 fixed for ever the influence of Christianity from end to 
 end of our northern realm?
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 37 
 
 The argument had gone this way and that; Paulinus 
 had pleaded for the new, and brave old men had pleaded 
 for the old; the Chief Priest had spoken half on this side 
 and half on that; when there rose in the hall an aged 
 man who had the gift of poetry, and surely our English 
 tongue has not made sweeter music through the centuries 
 than the music of these words he said. 
 
 What came before life, and what comes after, all is 
 mystery. The life of each man that is all that each 
 man knows. 
 
 The King and his chief captains and Ministers are 
 sitting in council on a dark winter's day; rain and snow 
 without, and a bright fire within. Suddenly comes a 
 little bird ; a sparrow flies in at one door, tarries a moment 
 in the light of the fire on the hearth, and then flies out at 
 the other door into the winter darkness whence it came. 
 Whence, none can say; whither, no man knows; and so 
 is the life of man. 
 
 What is before us, what lies after, we know not. If 
 this new doctrine will tell us anything of these mysteries, 
 the before and after, let us follow it. 
 
 The King was moved that winter night, and, if not a 
 sparrow falls to the ground without our Father's notice, 
 what joy that little sparrow must have stirred in God's 
 abode as it flew through the King's great hall, tarrying a 
 moment by the blazing hearth, and, all unknown, stirring 
 up this vision that must have pleased the King and may 
 have fixed his mind ! For Edwin was decided now. The 
 Chief Priest of the idols finally agreed with the King. 
 Nobody, he said, had worshipped the gods more dili- 
 gently than he, yet he remained poor, when, had the gods 
 been good for anything, he might have been rich. The 
 very man was he, Coifi, for what was now to happen, for 
 the day had come to overthrow the ancient gods.
 
 38 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 We who are a thousand years or more from that great 
 day can hardly understand how great it was, but one of 
 the things that leap to the mind out of history is this ride 
 of Coifi through a country lane to break up the gods. 
 Coifi had made the gods his trade, and he may have felt 
 that they were bits of wood and nothing more; but 
 Edwin had believed in them, his Ministers and captains 
 had believed, his people had bowed down and worshipped 
 them. All the powers of heaven and earth they had 
 believed these idols to possess. We who believe in God 
 Invisible can hardly think of the solemnity and awe with 
 which these people long ago looked on their visible gods. 
 In these mute, inscrutable figures standing there they 
 saw the powers of life and death, of good and evil fortune, 
 of victory or defeat in battle and prosperity in peace, of 
 storms and fair weather, of hope fulfilled or broken. 
 
 And now they believed in them no longer; they were 
 to smash them into bits. No wonder Edwin was per- 
 suaded slowly. He was one of the greatest kings our 
 Island had before the Normans came, and under him 
 Northumbria flourished and was wisely governed. 
 Wherever Edwin went they bore in front of him a banner 
 of purple and gold, for no king before had had such power 
 over Britain as he. Highways and byways were safe, 
 and it became an English proverb that in Edwin's day a 
 woman and her babe might walk scatheless from sea to 
 sea. His people loved him, and he loved his people; it 
 is said that wherever he found a good spring of water on 
 a country road he fixed a stake near by, with a brass cup 
 from which the passing traveller might drink. 
 
 And the great King Edwin had believed in his gods; 
 he had believed that all things had come to him through
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 89 
 
 them. No wonder he waited; no wonder he was afraid. 
 It was as if we were tomorrow to destroy our temples, 
 burn our Bibles, and recant our faith in God. We can 
 think of Edwin trembling lest, after all, the idols should 
 be true, and their power should overwhelm him when it 
 was all too late. 
 
 But Coifi had no fears. " None so fit as I," he said ; 
 "I taught the people to worship them; I will destroy 
 them;" and he called for a spear and a horse and set 
 out. We know the way he went ; we can ride up the very 
 lane ourselves, for Coifi galloped on his charger up Good- 
 manham Lane, near Market Weighton in Yorkshire, and 
 rode like a madman up to the temple door. He thrust 
 his spear through the door itself, and he who had led the 
 people in sacred worship here now called them to follow 
 him till every vestige of the temple was destroyed. They 
 burned it down with the idols and all it contained, and, 
 as no calamity befell them, Edwin and his chiefs went 
 to York and were baptised, on Easter Day in 627. They 
 were baptised in a little wooden church that Edwin built, 
 the beginning of the noble minster that towers above the 
 roofs of York today. The spring from which the water 
 came lies under the minster still, and the stone of Edwin's 
 bigger church is part of the foundations. 
 
 Edwin died, unhappily, while the stone church was 
 building, and at the death of this strong man the kingdom 
 and the Church broke up. Everywhere was strife where 
 had been peace, and those who had accepted Christianity 
 lightly now lightly gave it up. For very safety Paulinus 
 and Queen Ethelburga fled by sea to Kent, taking with 
 them to Canterbury a cross of gold and a chalice of gold, 
 which may still be among our buried treasures there.
 
 40 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Paulinus lived on at Rochester, but his work in North- 
 umbria crumbled, for when he fled with the Queen every 
 pillar of the Church fled too, all but one sweet singer who 
 stayed behind in York and finally took refuge in the village 
 we call Akebar, through which still runs the stream where 
 he baptised his converts. 
 
 As for the church in York that was to grow through 
 the centuries into the mighty minster, it fell into ruin. 
 The timbers of the roof broke up so that the rain fell in 
 and the birds flew in and out. In at one door would come 
 a little sparrow, tarrying a moment by the altar, then out 
 through the window, and whither no man knows. So is 
 the life of man, and this strange, eventful story. 
 
 The great work of the kingdom of Northumbria was 
 reaching its zenith when Edwin died. It had been for 
 half a century and more at the head of England's life. 
 Its monasteries were the treasure-houses of whatever 
 knowledge had accumulated in the nation, but chief of 
 all its services to the English people was its influence in 
 securing the beginning of unity among them, and in 
 saving them from heathendom. For still religion had its 
 seat in York, with centres at Jarrow and other places on 
 the Tyne; and from these homes of faith and learning 
 the missionaries of Northumbria would go throughout the 
 land, spreading their message far and wide, until it was so 
 firmly planted that no storm could uproot it. 
 
 But half a century after Edwin died the supremacy of 
 Northumbria passed away, and the northern kingdom 
 settled down to lay the great foundations of social peace. 
 Its fame stood high, and well might her sons be proud of 
 it. Two centuries come between the death of Edwin and 
 the birth of Alfred, and in these critical years for our land
 
 OLD TIME LOOKS DOWN ON A NEW TRAVELLER
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 41 
 
 stand out three noble lives. There was Aldhelm, a bishop 
 of royal race ; Bede, the choir boy who became immortal ; 
 and Alcuin, the schoolmaster friend of Charlemagne and 
 tutor at his Court. 
 
 Bede, whom we call the Venerable, was the middle 
 link in this great living chain, and he stands out in our 
 national memory because he is the first shining example 
 of the way in which the coming of Christianity transformed 
 the nation's life. 
 
 A treasure truly beyond compare was Bede. He was 
 born about the year 673, somewhere about Monkwear- 
 mouth; and, though men still vividly remembered the 
 reign of the idols, he grew up in an atmosphere aglow with 
 religion, for every day he heard the hammers of men who 
 were building monasteries, and he saw rising the monastery 
 at Jarrow in which he was to spend his life. We can still 
 see at Monkwearmouth a porch through which he may 
 have passed. Travellers from the Continent were bringing 
 holy pictures, craftsmen from Italy came with rare and 
 beautiful glass, artists were making pictures for those 
 who could not read, and Bede must have been stirred 
 by all the earnestness about him. 
 
 We know almost nothing of his early life, and, though 
 he wrote more than any other living man in his day, he 
 tells us little or nothing of himself. He was too busy 
 making knowledge known. But we have one little 
 picture of him in the monastery, where he was brought 
 up on fish, cheese, butter, beans, meats, and home-brewed 
 ale, for we read that when plague swept across the Tyne, 
 sweeping away in the monastery all who could read or 
 preach, " except the abbot and one little lad," this lad, 
 who was Bede, was a wonderful comfort to the old man.
 
 42 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It was an age of superstition beyond anything that 
 could now be believed, and Bede, scholar though he was, 
 believed in the miracles that were reported everywhere. 
 
 He believed like a child the story that somebody told 
 him of the Abbot of Lindisfarne, who had been in a boat 
 to Fame Island to see a hermit there and was caught 
 half-way back in a violent storm. The hermit came out 
 of his cave and called upon God to stop the storm, and it 
 stopped while the boat got safe to shore, and then raged 
 again for a day. 
 
 He believed the story the Abbot of Beverley told of a 
 dumb man who lived in a hut, to whom the bishop came 
 one day and made a cross on his tongue. " Say A," said 
 the bishop, and the man said A. " Say B," said the 
 bishop, and the man said B. So they went on through 
 the alphabet, and at last into syllables and words, until 
 the man could not be stopped talking all night long. 
 
 He believed the story of the earl's servant who lay 
 dying with a coffin at his side, who, when the bishop gave 
 him his blessing, got up and joined the party at dinner 
 and lived for many years. 
 
 He believed the story of the man out of his mind who 
 slept all night on a saint's tomb and woke in his right 
 mind the next morning. 
 
 He believed the story of the crows banished by a saint 
 for carrying off thatch from his hut, but allowed to return 
 in three days, when they hung their heads in submission 
 and brought tribute to the monks in the form of a lump 
 of lard for greasing boots. 
 
 But we must not belittle the mind of Bede because he 
 believed in things that may seem foolish now. Francis 
 Drake and Shakespeare believed things quite as wild. 
 The truth about Bede is that he was perhaps the wisest 
 man alive in the England of his day. He loved know-
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 43 
 
 ledge and music and beauty, and he worked like a man 
 who could never grow tired. He was never more than a 
 mile or two from home, but he met thousands of people 
 who called at his monastery, and he learned chanting from 
 the principal chanter of St. Peter's, who was lent to the 
 monastery for a year by the Pope, and sang so sweetly 
 that people came from everywhere around to hear him. 
 
 One of the greatest English writers has said of Bede 
 that he was the father of English learning, and when we 
 think how rare learning was, and how difficult it was to 
 build it up, we realise how tremendous an achievement was 
 this good man's life. " I am my own secretary; I make 
 my own notes; I am my own librarian," he said. He 
 had six hundred monks in his school at Jarrow, and the 
 text-books he wrote for them were the wonder of his time. 
 
 They contained all that was known in England about 
 astronomy, meteorology, physics, music, grammar, arith- 
 metic, medicine, and philosophy. He was master of the 
 whole range of science in his day, and the work he did is 
 almost beyond belief. 
 
 His greatest book, the Ecclesiastical History of the 
 English People, must have taken him at least two thousand 
 hours merely to copy out, apart from all the thinking and 
 research of it. One of his essays on Time fills two hundred 
 pages, and he wrote essays on such subjects quite 
 remarkable in those days as why the sea is salt, rain- 
 bows and volcanoes, lightning and thunder and the winds, 
 and the working of the calendar. He was a sort of 
 Children's Encyclopedia man a thousand years and more 
 ago. It is said that he made himself blind by his writing, 
 and it is no doubt true that he killed himself at last by 
 stooping to write.
 
 44 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 The number of books he left behind was seventy-nine, 
 every one written laboriously with his own hand or 
 dictated when he could write no more; and when death 
 came to him at last, on the evening of Ascension Day, it 
 found him writing still. 
 
 He was writing out the Bible in the language of the 
 English people, and is it not a striking thing that this 
 first human scene that comes into our literature, the 
 pathetic chapter with which the tale of our books really 
 opens, is the story of the book that has survived all other 
 books, and will survive whatever books may yet be 
 written? This old man writing out the Bible for the 
 first time in our language is the oldest picture we have 
 in our English literature, and there is nothing more 
 pathetic in the twelve hundred years that have passed 
 away since. 
 
 For weeks the old man had been short of breath, but 
 every day he gave thanks to God and was wonderfully 
 cheerful, reading and singing psalms. He knew that he 
 was dying, and he hastened on with his translation, 
 "for I do not want my boys to read a lie," he said, " or 
 to work to no purpose after I am gone." On his last day 
 there was still a chapter to be finished, and he said to 
 his boy, " Get out your pen and ink, and write fast," 
 and they went on till afternoon. Then he remembered 
 some things he wished to give his friends before he died, 
 and he called them round him and gave his little gifts; 
 he had neither gold nor silver, but in his chest he had 
 stores of pepper, napkins, and incense, and he gave them 
 to his brothers as if a king were giving each one a jewel 
 from his crown. Then he told them they would see his 
 face no more.
 
 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 45 
 
 That evening they reached the translation of the last 
 chapter of St. John. Bede bade the boy write quickly, 
 and after a while the boy exclaimed, " One sentence, dear 
 master, is left unfinished." The old man summoned up 
 his strength and gave him the translation. "It is 
 finished," said the boy, and Bede said, " True, it is finished," 
 and closed his eyes, and died. 
 
 Thus passed from our Island, out into the universe, 
 one of the rarest figures of whom our history tells, and 
 one of the noblest lives that Christianity ever gave our 
 race. In him, says our most interesting historian, English 
 literature strikes its roots; he was our first great scholar, 
 our first historian, and the father of national education. 
 
 We do not know exactly when or where he was born, 
 and no man knows where he now lies. He came into the 
 world somewhere in the countryside in which he spent his 
 life; he was buried in that same countryside and was 
 afterwards moved to Durham Cathedral; but his bones 
 have long been scattered, and none can say where they 
 are resting now. Out of mystery he comes into history, 
 out of history he goes into mystery again. But we know 
 that he sowed such seed as still bears fruit in this old 
 land, and the fruit it bears is something rich and rare, 
 that all may have but none can take away.
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 
 
 LIKE a garden of roses our Island is in June ; like the 
 very gate of Heaven it shall be ere our race is run. 
 
 But the way the Island came, the long, long trail of 
 her children where is any tale like that ? Out of tragedy 
 and pathos and pity unthinkable has come our little land. 
 The centuries have rolled away since the wolf prowled 
 down our roads, but how many lifetimes have gone since 
 human barbarism prowled through England in the high 
 noonday? Not more than two or three, and if we go 
 back only to Shakespeare's day, the spacious days of 
 Queen Elizabeth and her immortal seamen, the days 
 when children still heard tales of Drake and Raleigh from 
 the men who saw them, the days when Milton would sit 
 playing his organ with Cromwell listening even in those 
 near days we find that the life of our Island was so pitiful 
 and tragic and sad, so cruel and appalling, that as we 
 read of it we can hardly believe that truth is true. Let 
 us look back very quickly to those days, the world that 
 Shakespeare lived in. 
 
 When Shakespeare stood at the playhouse door in 
 London, holding the horses of the lords and ladies who 
 threw him their coppers, he must have seen poor people 
 passing by with little white rods in their hands. Without 
 these rods the people dared not leave their homes, for 
 they were the sign that plague had visited their houses 
 within forty days. For three hundred years plague 
 
 46
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 47 
 
 raged in England, bursting out now and then in a frightful 
 holocaust of death. For a time it would die down, but 
 England lived in constant peril of this messenger of death, 
 which cut off hundreds here and thousands there, and at 
 last destroyed one-fifth of the people of London. The 
 floors of houses were strewn with rushes, often undisturbed 
 for years; the streets were spread with filth which only 
 rooks and ravens and jackdaws ever thought of carrying 
 away. 
 
 Nobody in Shakespeare's day seems to have had the 
 courage or the knowledge to face this spectre of disease 
 that grew before their eyes, stalking through the country 
 unopposed, cutting down princes and people; yet the 
 plague was simply the child of ignorance and neglect. 
 But we must not be hard on these doctors who were not 
 so wise as we are now. Nobody was, and even Shakespeare 
 believed in witches. So did Bacon, so did Milton, so did 
 John Wesley. The stories of wizards and goblins that 
 we read now are as nothing to the stories kings believed 
 in then. The Parliament that made Cromwell Protector 
 hanged or drowned or burned three thousand women for 
 witchcraft, and even the children of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
 who left their homes for freedom's sake, put witches to 
 death across the sea. 
 
 Everybody believed in them. The King of Shake- 
 speare's England decreed that anyone who should take 
 advice from an evil spirit should die. Cromwell's troops 
 spent the night before the battle of Newbury in drowning 
 a poor old woman. All over the country were these poor 
 women, whose evil powers were supposed to be the cause 
 of whatever went wrong. Old Moll White was blamed 
 for everything; there was not a maid in her parish, it
 
 48 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 was said, who would take a pin from her though she 
 offered a bag of gold with it. If a horse was lame, Moll 
 White had done it; if the milk went wrong, Moll White 
 was in the churn; if the hounds were going out, the 
 master of the hunt would send his servant to see if Moll 
 White had been out that morning. If they were not 
 burned, these women were drowned. They were wrapped 
 in a sheet and dragged through a pond ; if they sank they 
 were innocent ; if they floated they were guilty. A good 
 old man who had been fifty years the vicar of a Suffolk 
 village was tortured till in his pain he confessed that he 
 had employed two imps to sink a ship at sea. So great 
 was the fear of the supernatural over the land. 
 
 Several strokes with the lash was the doctor's cure for 
 a lunatic in those days, and the sure cure for certain 
 diseases was the touch of the king. " Hamlet " was in 
 the world, and Shakespeare and Cromwell and Milton 
 were in their graves, when six people were crushed to 
 death in trying to get their children near enough to the 
 King of England for him to touch their bodies and cure 
 them. It is hard to believe it now, but fifteen centuries 
 after the woman pressed through the streets of Jerusalem 
 to touch the hem of Christ's garment, mothers were 
 pressing through the streets of London that the King 
 might touch the hem of their children's garment and bring 
 them healing. 
 
 And in those days, too, when Shakespeare was writing 
 that " the quality of mercy is not strained," the quality 
 of mercy in English law was utterly unknown. Even 
 strong men must shake a little when they read some pages 
 of our nation's story. Three hundred of the noblest men 
 and women in the Island were burned alive in three years
 
 DOWN THESE OLD ROADS THERE PASSED THE ANCIENT BRITISH CHIEFTAIN WITH HIS 
 COAT OF SKIN, THE ROMAN PASSING WITH HIS COAT OF MAIL THE SAXON .AND THE 
 DANE AND THE NORMAN PASSING FROM KEEP TO KEEP 
 
 [See Chattier 7
 
 THE ANCIENT MEN OF THE ISLAND SET OUT ON A VOYAGE OF EXPLORATION: A SCENE 
 ON THE RIVER PERHAPS A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO 
 
 [See Chapter 2
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 49 
 
 because they were faithful to God. If you will look in 
 your Bible you will probably find there a page which 
 disgraces the men who put it there and the Church which 
 keeps it there a dishonest dedication to a craven king, 
 and it was this King of England who, with his own hands, 
 tortured an old man for causing a storm at sea. There is 
 an old book with a picture of a woman and her baby 
 " tied together in a bag and thrown into a river in Scot- 
 land, and four men hung at the same time, for eating 
 goose on a fast day." The drawing of blood in a quarrel 
 was punished by cutting off the right hand, and if a man 
 exported one of his own sheep his left hand was cut off. 
 A beggar was whipped the first time he was found, the 
 second time his ears were cut off, the third time he was 
 killed. Even under George the Third the common law 
 of England punished people by slitting their nostrils and 
 cutting off their ears, and for a long time men convicted 
 of treason were dragged to the block at the horse's tail. 
 
 Marriages at five years old were not rare, and marriages 
 at ten were common. The Duke of Buckingham's daughter 
 was a widow at nine, and we read of her romping in an 
 orchard in her widow's veil. Hardly anybody read a 
 book, and hardly anybody travelled. Even if a traveller 
 dared to cross the Channel he found it swarming with 
 pirates. The Bible was a new book then, and the few 
 copies supplied for the people were chained in churches. 
 
 Parliament was corrupt. Oxford offered to elect a 
 candidate who would pay the debts of the town, and the 
 Duke of Marlborough accepted the offer. Lord Chester- 
 field wrote to his son that he had offered 2500 for a seat 
 in Parliament, but could not get it because the rich India 
 merchants had bought up all the seats in the market. 
 
 E
 
 50 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 William Wilberforce, who freed the slaves, paid 8000 for 
 his seat in Parliament. 
 
 With Parliament so corrupt, how could honesty be 
 expected in the country ? In ninety years forty million 
 acres of common land were stolen from the people. The 
 prisons were let out to contractors, who ran them for 
 profit. Open sewers poisoned the air of London. There 
 was no sort of light except in winter, and those who went 
 out by night hired link-boys to bear torches in front of 
 them. It was as probable as not that in walking through 
 the streets of London a lady would receive a pail of water 
 on her head from a window above. The debtors' prisons 
 were full; one misfortune could doom a man to lifelong 
 confinement. People refusing to plead at the Old Bailey 
 were put in low dark chambers, where heavy weights of 
 iron were laid on them till they were willing to plead, 
 when they were given brandy and carried back into court. 
 
 The conditions of the British Empire were unthink- 
 able. A man sent to Australia said to a magistrate 
 in 1800 : " Let a man be what he will, when he comes 
 here he is soon as bad as the rest. The heart of a man is 
 taken from him, and there is given him the heart of a 
 beast." Those who dared to write against kings had 
 their books burned by the hangman, and were put in 
 the pillory with their ears nailed; when they were set 
 free the ears were often left behind. Milton's books 
 were burned; the author of Robinson Crusoe was put in 
 the pillory ; a brave English writer was in prison two years 
 for speaking the truth about a German blackguard who 
 happened to be our Prince of Wales. 
 
 But it was the traffic in human beings that was the 
 great blot on the Island then. It is strange and terrible
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 51 
 
 to reflect that while John Wesley was riding through the 
 Island, preaching the brotherhood of man and the Father- 
 hood of God, British ships were carrying millions of 
 people from their homes in Africa, chaining them between 
 low decks with no room to raise their heads, and landing 
 them as slaves in the New World. Great families owned 
 slaves, and thought it right; it was largely owing to the 
 profits of the slave trade that Mr. Gladstone was born 
 rich, so that out of Slavery, we may say, came the oppor- 
 tunity of that great builder-up of Liberty. 
 
 John Wesley must have seen in shop windows, again 
 and again, handcuffs and iron collars sold for slaves; 
 chains of slavery were bought and sold as openly as watch- 
 chains now. Between the birth of Shakespeare and the 
 death of Wesley about six million slaves were shipped 
 from Africa to America, and in one century 250,000 were 
 thrown into the sea, alive or dead, from British ships. 
 Our English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 
 sent missionaries to West Africa and owned slaves in 
 the West Indies, and so little did it occur to them that 
 slaves were human beings that this Gospel Society never 
 dreamed of giving them any sort of teaching. When 
 Wilberforce was able to raise his protest against this 
 trade it took him twenty years to win for these poor slaves 
 the rights of human beings, and there are men still living 
 who remember the day when England washed her hands 
 of this terrible crime. 
 
 That is how England treated black men : how did it 
 treat our own countrymen, the toilers of the Island ? 
 
 It treated them for four hundred years and more 
 under laws which made every labourer a slave. The men 
 who listened to John Wesley in the villages of England
 
 52 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 were let out by the parish to their masters. A farmer 
 would turn off his men, whom nobody else would engage, 
 so that they would be driven to the workhouse and then 
 go back to the farmer at pauper wages. The farmer 
 would get them back cheap. No man dare save a penny ; 
 thrift was the sure way to beggary and despair. The man 
 who had a little money saved was considered a danger to 
 his master; he could ask for wages enough to keep his 
 family alive. And so the thrifty man was turned away 
 till he had spent his savings, when the master knew he 
 would come back again, let out on hire from the workhouse 
 at cheap rates. From Bannockburn to Waterloo some- 
 thing like this was the lot of the English working man. 
 
 We talk proudly of how the Island beat Napoleon 
 long ago, but how many of us know how we really beat 
 Napoleon ? A proud story it is as we read it in the history 
 books; as it will read in the Book of Judgment there is 
 nothing more terrible in the story of the world. 
 
 The time came when the burden of the war was too 
 grievous to be born, and at last the employers complained 
 that the high wages for men and women made it impos- 
 sible to pay the heavy taxes. Then it was that those 
 who should have known better encouraged the manu- 
 facturers to use the children. It seemed, an old writer 
 said, as if there fell upon the manufacturers the terrible 
 words Take the children. 
 
 They seemed to fall upon England like the voice of 
 doom, and the masters listened to them. They took the 
 children. They crammed the factories with machines so 
 close that there was just room for little bodies to slip in 
 and out of belts and wheels and spinning shafts. They 
 took children at nine years old, they took them at six,
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 53 
 
 they took them at four; and they kept them in the fac- 
 tories thirteen hours a day. They kept overseers to 
 whip them if their little bodies became drowsy or slow 
 after ten hours of work; they kept blacksmiths to rivet 
 and chain them if they tried to run away. They made 
 them clean the machinery while they ate their porridge 
 mixed with water; they made them walk as much as 
 thirty miles a day about their work; they killed and 
 maimed them in thousands. 
 
 Down in the mines, too, these children went; they 
 stood fifteen hours without a rest in the cold, dark mine, 
 opening and shutting trapdoors, or harnessed to heavy 
 trucks, or standing in slime from five in the morning till 
 six at night, pumping water at the bottom of the shaft. 
 In these mines, often overrun with rats, these children 
 would spend the few years of their unhappy lives. They 
 were cheaper than horses; if a horse should die another 
 must be bought, but if children should die there were 
 plenty to take their places in the iron chains with which 
 they dragged the coal which was making England great. 
 
 We are not reading pages from a novel, or from a 
 history of China : we are reading of the life of an ordinary 
 child in our Island in days that many still remember. 
 When the invention of machinery changed the face of 
 industry, bringing homework to an end and setting up 
 the factory system in its place, slave-dealers, called by a 
 prettier name, went up and down the Island and arranged 
 to buy the workhouse children for the factories. The 
 guardians were glad to get rid of them, and some bar- 
 gained that with every twenty children the contractors 
 should include one poor little child that was out of its 
 mind. When the contractor had collected the children,
 
 54 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 he would ship them in barges to the cotton towns, where 
 they were kept in cellars till the millowners came and 
 picked out the strongest. If a contractor went bankrupt, 
 the children were put up for sale as his property. 
 
 Nobody seemed to care about all these things. There 
 were great men living, your heroes and mine, but they 
 seem to have been unmoved by things that make us 
 shudder now. Shakespeare was writing the Merchant of 
 Venice while the King of England was inflicting torture 
 as cruel as Shylock's. Cromwell slaughtered people 
 without mercy. Milton wrote in burning words of the 
 poor people of Piedmont " whose bones lay scattered in 
 the Alpine mountains cold," but he wrote no word for 
 the poor women burned as witches at his door. And it 
 is odd to think that Daniel Defoe, who has given us all 
 such happy hours with Robinson Crusoe, boasted of the 
 happy state of things in which little girls of four could 
 earn their living. Robert Southey wrote, to his eternal 
 honour, that the slave trade was mercy compared with 
 the child trade in the factories, but Parliament took no 
 notice until it was afraid when the children were dying 
 so fast that there was no room in the churchyards, so 
 that the manufacturers in the House of Commons feared 
 the people if the truth were known. Then they passed an 
 Act limiting the work of children to twelve hours a day. 
 Parliament, we may say, stopped the killing of children 
 because there was no room to bury them. 
 
 But what Parliament did was almost nothing, and soon 
 it all began again. Mothers carried their babies to the 
 mills at four in the morning, and things were worse than 
 ever. The manufacturers had friends everywhere, and 
 when an Act was passed forbidding the employment of
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 55 
 
 children under nine they cried out that they would be 
 ruined. Manchester would become a tomb, said Daniel 
 O'Connell ; and, as one in eight of its people lived in dark 
 cellars, he might have added that it would not matter 
 much, for a tomb is a fitting place for a slum. At a 
 Parliamentary Committee a doctor who was asked if 
 amusement or recreation was necessary for a child said 
 that he did not see that it was necessary at all, and another 
 doctor, when asked if a child could work twenty-three 
 hours at once, would give no answer except that " perhaps 
 it could not work twenty-four." 
 
 Happily for England, Lord Shaftesbury came, and he 
 fought like a hero for the children, so that in 1842 little 
 girls were saved from the slavery of the mine, and no boys 
 under ten were allowed to go down. In that year one- 
 third of all the workers in our mines were children; for 
 every two men who went down, one child went too. 
 Lord Shaftesbury saved the children who were being 
 slowly murdered in our mills and factories; he saved the 
 children whose eyes were hardly ever allowed to see the 
 sun. He saved the little sweeps who were forced up 
 chimneys from three in the morning till ten at night, 
 and allowed to sleep the other five hours on a sack of 
 soot in a cellar. If they did not climb the chimneys fast 
 enough their masters would burn straw behind them, and 
 the Bill to stop this took a hundred years to pass. 
 
 The British Parliament which freed the negro slaves 
 cared little for the child slaves of England, and the truth 
 is that Lord Shaftesbury saved the children of this land 
 from a slavery which the leaders of the nation for a hun- 
 dred years were quite willing to impose upon them. They 
 were ground into gold to fill the pockets of the manu-
 
 56 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 facturers, and there is not in all the world a story of more 
 woe than the story of the saving of England's children 
 while most of England's great men looked on, or passed by. 
 
 Like a fearful dragon selfishness rose up in the path of 
 those who tried to make our Island great and happy; but 
 more powerful than selfishness has been ignorance and 
 superstition, and the prejudice against new things. Science 
 has brought New York nearer to London than Edinburgh 
 was in the coaching days, but how did the railway come 
 to begin this work of opening up the world ? The truth is 
 that the man who made the railway possible was saved from 
 a pauper's grave by a handful of workmen, and the world 
 waited twenty-five years for a man to carry out his work. 
 
 The whole country scoffed at the penny post, the Post- 
 master General denounced it as the wildest scheme he had 
 ever heard. The Post Office did its best to kill the tele- 
 phone, as the Admiralty tried to kill the telegraph. Sir 
 Walter Scott called the inventor of gas-lighting a madman, 
 and a scientist said you might as well try to light London 
 with a slice of the moon. The great Michael Faraday, 
 the cleverest electrician of his age, pooh-poohed electric 
 light. The President of the Royal Society ridiculed the 
 idea of steamships. 
 
 The men who wrote new pages in the book of know- 
 ledge, who brought us light out of darkness and gave new 
 powers of happiness to mankind, were treated as if they 
 were criminals or madmen. Jenner, who led the way out 
 of the plague of smallpox, was bitterly opposed. Sir 
 James Simpson, who discovered the use of chloroform and 
 saved the race from infinite pain, was denounced as an 
 infidel. William Harvey, who revealed to men the most 
 important truth about their bodies, was bitterly perse-
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 57 
 
 cuted. Sir Isaac Newton, for revealing the great fact 
 of gravitation, was condemned as a wicked man. 
 
 But it is a wretched thing, you may think, to look back 
 so far, to go in this way through the miseries of the distant 
 past. Well, let us look at the world that many still 
 remember. It was still a world of ignorance. Out of 
 twenty-six barons who signed Magna Carta only three 
 could write their names, and six hundred years after that 
 half the men and women of the nation could not write. 
 For a generation after Waterloo it was as if there hung 
 over the gate of the Island a notice that no education was 
 wanted here. Half the children were growing up without 
 any learning at all, and knowledge was taxed in every 
 way. So was health. There was a tax on windows, 
 which kept the sun from the houses of the poor ; there was 
 a tax on insurance, which hindered thrift ; there was a tax 
 on advertising, which hindered business ; there was a tax 
 on tops, which hindered play. Worst of all was the four- 
 penny tax on newspapers from 1815, as if the nation which 
 had beaten Napoleon could not endure cheap newspapers. 
 
 All through the first half of last century knowledge 
 and education were kept from the poor, and even Lord 
 Shaftesbury, who had saved our children from slavery, 
 declared that the idea of national education was dangerous 
 to the State and against religion itself. He who had saved 
 the bodies of our children was afraid to save their minds. 
 
 No wonder our prisons were crammed. Elizabeth 
 Fry found men and women and children huddled together 
 in Newgate like wild beasts, and the scenes of prison life 
 frightened even strong men. The Governor of Newgate 
 dared not go into the cells until Elizabeth Fry had done 
 her work. ; For years innocent men lay in gaol, women
 
 58 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 and children with them, because they could not afford 
 to pay the warders for the little bit of extra food, or the 
 light from a tiny window they had had; and they stayed 
 on, growing deeper in debt, until the life that remained 
 to them was not worth living. So, from year to year, 
 this pitiful condition of our Island remained. 
 
 We talk with admiration of the men who won the 
 Great War, but how did the Island treat the men who 
 broke Napoleon's power ? Let us look back. None of us 
 would have taken into our homes the average soldier at 
 Waterloo. Fourteen years after Waterloo the Duke of 
 Wellington said of the man who enlisted in the British 
 Army that he was generally the worst drunkard and 
 probably the worst workman in his town, and less than 
 fifty years ago the Minister for War told the House of 
 Commons that it had come to be a question whether the 
 British Army should collapse or not. We could not get 
 men. We never could get enough men for our last war 
 in Europe. Why? Let us see. 
 
 After the French wars were over, when large sums of 
 money were being voted to Wellington and the officers, 
 it was proposed to reward the men too, and what do you 
 think was to be their reward for Waterloo ? It was 
 proposed to reward them by limiting their flogging to a 
 hundred lashes ! The flogging of soldiers for all sorts of 
 offences was so bad that the floggers would take it in 
 shifts and a doctor stood by to say how much a man 
 could stand without dying. It is hard for us to believe 
 it, but the Government opposed this " reward " for the 
 men who beat Napoleon, and the flogging went on; 
 sometimes a man would get a thousand lashes. At last 
 a soldier was flogged to death, and Parliament then
 
 THE LONG, LONG TRAIL OF THE ISLAND 59 
 
 reduced the flogging to fifty lashes. And when do you 
 think this barbarism was stopped by the Mother of 
 Parliaments ? Even within your father's time Queen 
 Victoria wrote to Mr. Gladstone begging him not to stop 
 flogging, as it would take away from the officers the only 
 power they had of keeping young troops in order. Every 
 generous heart is proud today that the English humanity 
 of Mr. Gladstone prevailed over the German cynicism of 
 Queen Victoria, and the abolition of flogging was followed 
 by a rush to the colours. The Army at last had a character, 
 and men were not ashamed to belong to it. A soldier was 
 treated like a man, and was no longer a cringing creature 
 under a lash. 
 
 That is how we treated our Army, and the story of 
 the Navy is worse. Columbus took men from Spanish 
 prisons to find America; we sent out men from prison to 
 win Trafalgar. The Navy could never get enough men 
 to beat Napoleon, even by offering 70 apiece, but at 
 last every county was ordered to supply its share, and 
 they sent their beggars and vagabonds out to sea. Two 
 out of three men ran away from the Navy in Nelson's 
 wars, and we do not wonder, for most captains flogged 
 the men continually with cat-o'-nine-tails, and a sailor's 
 mates would generally make him drunk before the flogging, 
 as a doctor makes a man unconscious before an operation. 
 
 So, looking back on the long, long trail of the Island, 
 we see by what a strange dark way we came. It may 
 seem incredible, but it is no doubt true, that the peace of 
 those days was as cruel and hard for our people as the war 
 of these days was for the people of Belgium and France. 
 Few things could be worse than war, but at least we know 
 it, and all men long for it to end; but this terrible Past
 
 60 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 was the life of peace, from year to year, from generation 
 to generation. 
 
 Yet all through those far-off days there were those 
 who saw the vision, rare minds who knew that all these 
 things would end; and we know that in the end their 
 dreams came true. Out of the depths of the universe 
 comes the strength of those who fight for the Island. 
 They pass through the fires, but the armour of faith will 
 save them. Darkness and fear encompass them, but the 
 stars in their courses beckon them on. Storm and tempest 
 will press and rage about them, but the Everlasting Arms 
 will hold them up. They who fight for the Island fight 
 for the Living God who leads us on; they have those 
 mighty allies that never yet have failed a noble cause. 
 Did we not see, at Gheluvelt and many a place in the 
 Great War, the things that cannot be explained unless 
 we say that some invisible ally intervened? 
 
 All through history men have seen it. We have come 
 out of a Past that was darker than night ; we have come 
 out of a Peace that was worse than war, but we know 
 that nothing yet has beaten liberty, nothing has over- 
 thrown the power of righteousness. And so we march, 
 with faith unquenchable, to a future nobler yet, lifting 
 up our hearts and crying to the sun with Robert Browning, 
 the poet of our unconquerable hope 
 
 The year's at the spring, 
 And day's at the morn, 
 Morning's at seven, 
 The hillside's dew-pearled; 
 The lark's on the wing, 
 The snail's on the thorn, 
 God's in His heaven 
 All's right with the world.
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 
 
 AH ! the heroes of the Island, the long, long line of those 
 who died for you and me ! Though the Island should 
 be swallowed up by the sea, their names, with the things 
 they dreamed of and the things they did, will live on in 
 the deathless story of the human race. 
 
 Not one of us who does not share the splendour and 
 the glory of Sir Walter Raleigh. He made the Island 
 famous in the world, he raised her high, he set her marching 
 through the centuries, guardian of liberty and leader of 
 mankind. No story in the world can match this great 
 adventure of the British Empire through 400 years of 
 time, and it began as an idea in the mind of Walter 
 Raleigh. 
 
 He was the first of all the men who dreamed of it ; as 
 Alfred dreamed of an English nation set in these narrow 
 seas, so Raleigh dreamed of an English Empire beyond 
 the raging main. And yet the story of this man who 
 made us great, and flung our fame throughout the world, 
 and founded all the British Empire Queen Elizabeth ever 
 knew, is a tragedy too deep for tears, enough to break a 
 heart of stone. 
 
 He was born in that great seamen's little world of 
 Devon, in that great age of freedom when the Reformation 
 burst the prison walls of thought. The minds of our 
 Island were opening out. They dared to think and speak, 
 and there were things to think and speak about, for a 
 
 61
 
 62 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 beggarman from the streets of Madrid had found another 
 world, and America, like a magnet, drew all ships into it. 
 By the rivers of Devon, and on its rocky coast, this tall, 
 dark, handsome Walter Raleigh, with the face of a lover 
 and the soul of a poet and the heart of a dreamer, and the 
 light of far-away in his blue eyes this proud man prayed 
 that he might sail the sea and build up power and honour 
 for the land he loved. 
 
 If we call men pirates who swept the pirate off the 
 seas and built a fleet for England at their own expense, 
 who tramped over our Island night after night to man 
 their ships, who paid for it all out of their own pockets, 
 who risked their lives and their families and their fortunes 
 that the glory might be ours if such men as these are 
 pirates, Raleigh was poet and pirate too. He loved riches 
 and fame and power, but who does not ? He loved riches 
 for the power they brought him, and he spent them to 
 make his dreams come true. 
 
 He was a mighty figure in an age when mighty men 
 must hang about a throne if they would realise their 
 dreams, and Raleigh trod the open road to power. We 
 may believe that it was not for nothing, not for the chivalry 
 of it only, that he threw his cloak in the mud for Elizabeth 
 to walk on. A man who wanted royal charters to seek 
 new lands must have a friend at court, and if the friend 
 sat on the throne itself so much better for his royal charters. 
 
 He rose rapidly at court, and obtained great powers 
 and privileges. He lived like a lord in his palace at 
 Adelphi. He walked through the streets wearing a hat- 
 band of pearls and a jewel worth 400. He became one 
 of the greatest landowners in the kingdom. He was one 
 of the hardest-working men in the kingdom, too. He
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 63 
 
 worked like a giant. He would sleep for five hours, read 
 for four, play for two, and work for the rest, whether 
 day or night. If he graced the court and sought the 
 favour of Elizabeth, it was not for selfish purposes. He 
 was courtier, poet, historian, soldier, sailor, explorer, 
 scientist, orator, philosopher, and trustee of a great 
 estate, and he loved England more than all. Rare patriot 
 and lover of learning, it is said that he longed to set up 
 a bureau of knowledge where anyone might come for 
 information a dream that many men have had, but have 
 had so far in vain. 
 
 The truth is that Raleigh had the mind of a thinker 
 and of a man of action too. The rarest elements mixed 
 in him. His ideas were bold, and his faith in them was 
 boundless. He had that wonderful thing imagination, 
 as rare then as it is now. He was three hundred years 
 before Darwin, but even in his History of the World we 
 find the dim vision of that idea of Evolution that came 
 into Darwin's mind. It was not in the nature of things 
 that Raleigh should grasp its meaning, but he wrote of 
 the transformation that takes place in living creatures 
 in the course of ages, and of the daily witness of the 
 garden to the changing nature of fruits. But for the 
 inhumanity of the English king, the glory of English 
 history and English literature might have been enriched 
 beyond our dreams by this faithful, dauntless, far-seeing 
 man. It was the love of a queen and the hate of a king 
 that spoilt his life. 
 
 Across three centuries there comes to us today the thrill 
 of the vision of Sir Walter Raleigh. Who can think of 
 Virginia without the stirring of a great emotion ? There 
 were laid the foundation stones of the English-speaking
 
 64 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 world beyond the seas, and it was Raleigh who laid them. 
 He obtained from Queen Elizabeth a charter which must 
 be for ever remembered as the first great document in 
 the archives of the British Empire. It gave him power 
 to organise a fleet and go to sea, but charters had done this 
 before for other men; what was new in Raleigh's charter 
 was that it contemplated the permanent occupation and 
 settlement of the new country he discovered, and the 
 guarantee to all settlers of the privileges and rights of 
 citizens at home. 
 
 It was the beginning of the colonisation which has 
 spread to the ends of the earth, and it began in that part 
 of the new-found world which Raleigh named Virginia, 
 after the virgin queen. She would not let him go, and he 
 sent his ships out under other men, but she was glad when 
 this great dreamer's dreams came true ; she was glad that 
 while this man was about her court his ships were seeking 
 new lands, so that, as Raleigh said, the queen should 
 have " a better Indies than the King of Spain had any." 
 And so it came about that Raleigh's expeditions sailed 
 without him. It was one of his griefs that though he 
 organised his fleet, he himself must stay at home to 
 entertain the great Elizabeth. 
 
 But no court could contain the strength of such a man. 
 Regions Elizabeth never knew his daring spirit swayed. 
 The reports from Virginia enthralled him, and, though 
 tragedy on tragedy befell his expeditions, nothing could 
 destroy his faith that Virginia would become a mighty 
 place. We look back to all that Virginia is and all that 
 it has been, and there is something that burns like a 
 prophet's fire in those words of Raleigh long ago : " I 
 shall yet live to see it an English nation."
 
 A NECKLACE FOR A LITTLE MAID-A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO ON THE BANKS
 
 NINETEEN CENTURIES AGO ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER-THE ROMAN GENERAL DIRECTS 
 THE BUILDING OF THE ROMAN HOUSE NOW BURIED UNDER A FIELD IN KENT 
 
 [See Chapter 2
 
 THE CONQUEROR OF THE WORLD IN CHAINS IN THIS PRISON CELL CLAUDIA. THE 
 BRITISH LADY WHO BEFRIENDED PAUL IN ROME. WOULD COME TO TALK WITH THE 
 CAPTIVE IN THE DAYS WHEN HE WAS BROUGHT BEFORE AGRIPPA 
 
 [See Page 33
 
 ONE OF THE GREATEST DAYS IN THE STORY OF THE ISLAND WAS WHEN THE HIGH 
 
 PRIEST C01FI RODE UP GOODMANHAM LANE TO SMASH THE IDOLS
 
 His expedition left a hundred people in Virginia. 
 They found the climate good, the soil rich, and boundless 
 areas of country stretching away they knew not where. 
 It was like a Golden Age to these hundred people, until 
 some petty crime aroused the anger of the Red Indians, 
 who refused to cultivate the land ; so that food ran short 
 and the little settlement was menaced with starvation. 
 Suddenly Francis Drake appeared and gave them passage 
 home, and they had hardly left when Grenville arrived 
 with ships and stores. Not finding the Englishmen there, 
 he left fifteen volunteers as an outpost of Roanoke Island, 
 the only foot of territory then held secure for England. 
 Those fifteen men stood for the British Empire. Raleigh 
 sent out a new expedition, but could not find these men. 
 They were probably slain by treachery, and we may 
 think of them, that lonely group of Englishmen on the 
 edge of an unknown world, as the first martyrs of the 
 Empire. 
 
 But there was no despair in Raleigh's heart, however 
 sad it was. The American coast had been explored for 
 250 miles. He had found friendly peoples, he had found 
 potatoes and tobacco and mahogany; but, more than 
 all, he had found new inspiration for his dreams, and on 
 and on he went. Five expeditions to Virginia he equipped, 
 and they must have cost him a fortune. 
 
 The first expedition was murdered by Red Indians. 
 Captain John Smith, in charge of the second, was saved 
 by the pleading of Queen Pocahontas. She became 
 friendly, married an Englishman, and helped to build up 
 Jamestown. She came to England with her baby boy, 
 she went to see a Shakespeare play, she died and was 
 buried in a church by the Thames. Let us think of her
 
 66 
 
 kindly, this first queen over whom the British flag flew 
 oversea, all the more kindly because her son went back 
 to her kingdom and married an English girl, from whom 
 descended, through many strange times and many strange 
 scenes, the wife of President Wilson. 
 
 It is pathetic, in looking back to that great story of 
 Virginia, to see how true was the instinct of Raleigh. 
 He saw the light, however dark it was ; he kept the faith. 
 When he sent out Captain John White to look for those 
 fifteen men at Roanoke, he sent also another group of 
 settlers, so that when White left to come home for new 
 supplies, and to report that little tragedy, he left behind 
 him there eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two 
 children. One of the women was his daughter, Mrs. Dare, 
 who became the mother of Virginia Dare, the first child 
 ever born in the British Empire oversea. Virginia Dare ! 
 How great a name, how true ! Virginia stands to all the 
 world for daring; there was nothing Raleigh would not 
 dare for Virginia ; there is nothing Virginia has not dared 
 to face for her high place in mankind. 
 
 " I yet shall see her an English nation," the uncon- 
 querable Raleigh would say, and from near God's throne 
 he may yet look down on Virginia, where the British flag 
 first flew; Virginia, which gave George Washington and 
 President Wilson to the world ; Virginia, which raised the 
 first voice ever raised against the German kings of England ; 
 Virginia, which under Washington wrung her freedom 
 from our German kings, which under Lincoln fought and 
 bled though on the losing side in the war of freedom 
 for the slaves; which under Wilson lived to see America, 
 in the tercentenary year of Raleigh, hand in hand and 
 heart in heart with Raleigh's English nation.
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 67 
 
 It was the finding of Virginia that was the first great 
 dream of Raleigh's life. He had another the breaking of 
 the despotic power of Spain. He was perhaps the first 
 man who wrote in a book that England's defence must 
 ever be by sea, and the best energies of his life almost 
 all his strength that tragedy did not consume he gave 
 to building up our sea power. Freedom was in his blood, 
 and he hated the tyranny of Spain, vaunted abroad in the 
 world "as if the kings of Castile were the natural heirs 
 of all the earth." It was to break this power of Philip, 
 which threatened more and more to overwhelm these 
 islands, that Raleigh planned his expeditions. We need 
 not follow him through them all. Again and again he 
 sent them out, and at times he went out with them. 
 He loved his little Ark Raleigh; he thought her the best 
 ship in the world for all conditions. " We can see no sail 
 great or small," he said, " but how far soever they be off 
 we fetch them and speak with them." 
 
 He was setting out in her on one of his expeditions 
 when Frobisher came up behind to fetch him back. He 
 had dared to fall in love with a maid of honour at the 
 court, and his fond queen sent him to the Tower. It was 
 the beginning of his miseries. It did not suit Elizabeth 
 that her brilliant captain of the guard should transfer 
 his admiration to her maid of honour, but Raleigh was 
 happier in his wife than in his queen. She staked her 
 all to win him, and he once wrote to her, " I chose you and 
 loved you in my happiest times." Their letters move us 
 still across the gulf of time. 
 
 It was happy for them both that, while Raleigh lay 
 in the Tower, the expedition from which he had been 
 withdrawn came home again, bearing the richest prize
 
 68 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 ever landed on our shores. The bringer of all this wealth 
 could not be left to languish in the Tower. Elizabeth 
 let him out to look after the unloading, and down at 
 Dartmouth Raleigh was received with joy by his own 
 people. He gave most of his share of the treasure to 
 the Queen more than any man had presented her as 
 yet, he proudly said, and with this price he bought his 
 freedom. 
 
 He sailed again for Guiana two years later, with full 
 powers to do anything against Spain, and to that un- 
 fortunate adventure we may trace the source of half his 
 woes. 
 
 A strange world it was in those days. We read of a 
 king aged 110 who came to meet them mourning the death 
 of his son, " whom he most entirely loved " ; we read of 
 races of mysterious people " whose heads did not appear 
 above their shoulders " ; we read of a distant mountain 
 formed of crystals with a mighty river thundering from 
 its summit like a thousand bells ; and we read of Eldorado, 
 the fabled land of gold. Raleigh believed in it. He be- 
 lieved the stories of gold mines which Captain Keymis 
 brought him, and he came home to fit out a new expedition 
 to find the mines. 
 
 All the time the Spanish menace grew. Broken in 
 the Armada, Philip sought revenge, and we find the 
 dauntless Raleigh again and again in those sea fights 
 which at last established our supremacy. We find him 
 at Cadiz, inspiring that great fight in which the power 
 of Spain received its mortal wound. We find him at 
 Fayal, capturing the town alone before his commander, 
 Essex, arrived on the scene greatly to the exasperation 
 of Essex, who made no mention of Raleigh in his report
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 69 
 
 of this supreme achievement, and never forgave him 
 through all their years of rivalry at court. 
 
 Of all these | battles f Raleigh left his own accounts. 
 He was not only a fighter of battles, but historian too. 
 It was his description of the last fight of the Revenge 
 which inspired Lord Tennyson's immortal poem. The 
 more we think of Raleigh, the more the wonder of him 
 grows. This man would build his ships at his own expense 
 and tramp about in lanes for men to man them; would 
 take them out to sea to find new lands, to bring home 
 treasure, or to drive the Spaniards from Cadiz ; and would 
 come home and write a history of his fights that men 
 would read in ages yet to be. There is a letter in which he 
 tells how he hunted round the villages of Kent for runaway 
 sailors, dragging in the mire from ale-house to ale-house. 
 " As fast as we press men one day," he wrote, " they 
 run away another, and say they will not serve." 
 
 Such was this man, such was his zeal for England, 
 such were the blows he delivered to Philip of Spain, with 
 much toil and without much glory, for he never had an 
 independent command, and his life at court was harassed 
 and chequered as, one after another, new favourites came 
 and went. And then Elizabeth went, to that great 
 bourne from which there is no return. Now the poltroon 
 James comes on the scene, and from this hour there is no 
 happiness for Raleigh. 
 
 We need not claim for him that he had all the virtues ; 
 we need not claim that he was free from vice. He was a 
 part of all that he had met, as most men are. He was a 
 man of his time and a man of the court, subject to all the 
 influences and desires and temptations that swayed the 
 great men of his day. Let us believe that Raleigh had the
 
 70 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 virtues and the vices of humanity, but let us believe the 
 truth, at least; and the truth is that the treatment of 
 this founder of the British Empire is a stain on English 
 justice that eternity will not blot out. 
 
 He, Sir Walter Raleigh, who lived to break the power 
 of Spain for England's sake, was accused by some loafing 
 lord in a fit of temper of being a traitor to England and 
 a friend of Spain ; and on the strength of this, and nothing 
 else, he was sent to the Tower, suffered blow upon blow, 
 and lay year after year in his prison cage, while the glory 
 of his name was besmirched in treason. The Stuarts 
 were beginning well. James had come down from Scotland 
 hating this great Englishman. He sent Raleigh to his 
 trial, but he was determined on his doom. 
 
 Let us pass quickly over this dark scene. In vain 
 the prisoner begged to be confronted with his accuser; 
 not once through all the years of suspense and agony 
 were they brought face to face. The injustice of this trial 
 fills us with anger still. Raleigh's bitter enemy, Sir 
 Edward Coke, sat among his judges, and would say to 
 him: "Thou art a monster; thou hast an English face 
 but a Spanish heart; " and when Raleigh burst in with, 
 " Let me answer; it concerns my life," the Chief Justice 
 would pass on. Coke would call him a viper, and it has 
 been said that the coarse brutality of the Chief Justice 
 in passing sentence goes far to justify the story that the 
 judge had stolen purses in his youth. One who saw the 
 trial said : " When it began I would have gone a hundred 
 miles to see Raleigh hanged ; before it closed I would have 
 gone a thousand to save his life." 
 
 This is the sentence passed upon this man that he 
 was to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution,
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 71 
 
 to be hanged and cut down alive, to have his heart plucked 
 out and the head severed from the body, to have his 
 body divided into four quarters and disposed of at the 
 pleasure of King James. Raleigh, the man of Virginia, 
 the man of Cadiz, begged to say a few words to the lords, 
 and pleaded that he might die like a soldier, and that his 
 death might not be ignominious. What they did was to 
 set him at a window, where he watched the other prisoners 
 walk up to the scaffold and walk away reprieved, and 
 at that last moment Raleigh also was reprieved and sent 
 back to the Tower. 
 
 For twelve years he was there, a captive in a cage, 
 and it is said that these twelve years made Raleigh popular. 
 A great wave of national sympathy gathered about him. 
 From the terrace on which he was allowed to take his 
 walks he watched the river running to the sea, and his 
 mind would travel with the waves far out on the voyages 
 of his dreams. There little groups of people would stand 
 and watch him, and a sense of the cruelty of his captivity 
 would grow upon them. The oppression of it all in the 
 mind of such a man was relieved by the companionship 
 of his wife and their boy, who were allowed to share his 
 prison, and he had the great Ben Jonson as a fellow 
 captive for a little while. Rare companions they must 
 have been, whose quiet talks behind their prison bars 
 would have been worth today the memory of an eternity 
 of kings like James. It was James's son, the young Prince 
 of Wales, who loved this noble prisoner in the Tower, 
 and came to see him often, and it was he who said, with 
 that contempt for his father that all posterity shares, 
 " Only my father would keep such a bird in a cage." Yet 
 in his cage his spirit was not broken; stone walls did
 
 72 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 not a prison make for him. He turned a hen-house 
 into a laboratory, and amused himself with scientific 
 experiments. He had been in the Tower ten years, and 
 was sixty-two years old, when he started to write a 
 history of the world. It is thought he may have written 
 it for the young prince who loved him. 
 
 Such a labour in such an age was an amazing thing, 
 but Raleigh worked on until he had written over thirteen 
 hundred pages for his first volume. He wrote like a man 
 whose business it was to write. He wrote of a hundred 
 things, and he did it all so well that after his death it was 
 said that this book, written in his prison, gave him a 
 greater title to fame than all the work of his active years. 
 John Milton published some of Raleigh's work ; Cromwell 
 esteemed his History as second only to the Bible; and 
 it was said by Charles Kingsley that this volume was the 
 most God-fearing and God-seeing History ever known. 
 
 But the History was never finished; it was suppressed 
 because it " dealt too saucily with kings," and Raleigh 
 may have tired of wasting his few remaining years. He 
 did something else : he woke up one morning and bribed 
 two poor relations of a new favourite who had come to 
 court, and he was set free from the Tower to go on a war 
 expedition to Guiana to find the mine that Captain Keymis 
 knew. The old dream of Eldorado was on him again, 
 and he was free to follow it. 
 
 He came out of the Tower and walked through the 
 streets of London for the first time in twelve years. He 
 must have been a broken man, and he was sixty-three. We 
 can imagine the familiar figure making his way through 
 the streets by the Thames, startling little groups of people 
 as he passed, turning into Adelphi, the scene of his great
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 73 
 
 days, past Charing Cross, down Whitehall, and on to 
 Westminster, where he would turn into the solemn twilight 
 of the Abbey to live again through memory by the grave 
 of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 But his doom was hastening on. He was fifteen 
 months preparing for his expedition, and the knowledge 
 that Raleigh was free and fitting out his ships again set 
 Spain a-thinking. Philip was not yet dead, and he had 
 not forgotten Elizabeth and the great Armada. With an 
 idiot king on Elizabeth's throne the last of the Eliza- 
 bethans could be hunted to his doom. And so the 
 Spanisli ambassador protested to the king against the 
 freedom and activities of Raleigh, and in the end this 
 man who helped to smash the great Armada, the last of 
 those great men who spent their lives in fighting Spain, 
 who made the English throne safe for this king to sit on 
 and gave the English power at sea the last of this great 
 company of Elizabeth's immortals was handed over and 
 betrayed by James himself, who had done nothing much 
 fouler since with his own hands he tortured a poor old man 
 for causing a storm at sea. He set Raleigh free to organise 
 the expedition and allowed him to organise it on the basis 
 of war, and behind Raleigh's back he gave the Spanish 
 ambassador all the secret plans and this solemn promise 
 to Philip that if Raleigh offended the might of Spain 
 he, King James himself, would send the founder of the 
 British Empire back to be hanged in Madrid. 
 
 We need not follow Raleigh out. He was away a 
 year, and when he came back to Plymouth, on a glorious 
 June day in 1618, his faithful wife was waiting for him. 
 It must have been too much for her much-tried heart to 
 bear, for Raleigh had failed. The dream of Eldorado was
 
 74 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 not true. The treacherous Spaniards had attacked his 
 unarmed men; Keymis had slain himself in his cabin, 
 and, bitterest news of all this woeful tale, their boy was 
 dead. So Raleigh met again this woman he had loved 
 in their happy days at Sherborne ; so they met once more 
 in this most desperate hour. 
 
 And there, beside them, stood a kinsman, the scoundrel 
 Stukely, sent down by the King of England to arrest this 
 man in the name of Spain It was misery on misery. 
 Stukely set spies to watch and trap his prisoner on the 
 road to London. Soon they passed Sherborne, and 
 Raleigh, looking on the scene of his early married life and 
 thinking of the tragedy of the faithful woman at his side, 
 burst out : " All this was mine, and it was taken from 
 me unjustly." 
 
 In London he tried to escape, and Stukely pretended 
 to aid him. He left his house in Bread Street with Stukely 
 and a faithful servant. They took a boat for Tilbury. 
 The great Sir Walter Raleigh, who loved his life and had 
 given it all for England, was fleeing from his country. 
 This man who loved the sea and made it free for England 
 was hurrying to it as a fugitive. They passed the great 
 black mass of the Tower in the dark ; soon, if all went well, 
 he would be beyond the reach of his old prison-house, and 
 Raleigh, old and weary and forsaken, might die in peace. 
 
 But black treachery was waiting a little down the 
 river. Another boat came up, and the fugitive was 
 arrested in the name of the King. Not even then did he 
 suspect the treachery of Stukely. He bade him farewell, 
 and gave him his last few personal possessions as a mark 
 of a kinsman's affection; and yet this traitor was the 
 miserable tool of the infamous powers that were closing
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 75 
 
 fast round Raleigh. They put him in the Tower again 
 on the plea that he had offended Spain, though over his 
 head still hung the charge that he was a friend of Spain. 
 It did not matter what they charged him with; his 
 enemies were determined he should die. 
 
 In vain he pleaded for his life, in vain he protested 
 he was loyal to the King, in vain he called to be con- 
 fronted with his accusers ; the vengeance of Spain pursued 
 him ruthlessly. 
 
 The Spanish Ambassador was at the elbow of the King, 
 sneering at James that Raleigh and his men were in 
 England and had not been hanged, and James had no 
 time to listen to the founder of our Empire. And then, 
 in a letter which still quivers with emotion, Raleigh 
 wrote to him again. If he had spent his estate and lost 
 his son and suffered a world of miseries, he said, if he had 
 resisted the spoils with which his crews would have made 
 him rich, if he had surrendered his liberty when he was 
 master of his life, if he had brought his ships to England 
 when he might have sold them, he besought the King to 
 believe that all this he had done that it should not be 
 said the King had trusted a man who had betrayed him. 
 
 But James was busy writing essays on the Lord's 
 Prayer, and could not listen. They took the founder of 
 the British Empire and rushed him from the Tower, 
 shivering with ague, and condemned him to die the next 
 day. 
 
 He was " broken in his brains," he wrote in his despair. 
 " My services, hazards, and expenses for my country, 
 plantings, fightings, councils malice has all covered over." 
 On the night of October 28, 1618, his wife went to say 
 farewell. They parted for ever in this world as midnight
 
 76 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 struck, she who loved him with the love of women, he who 
 would have died for her, and in her last words she told 
 him through her tears that they had promised her his 
 body, which would not suffer the ignominy to which it 
 had been condemned twelve years before. Lying then 
 in the Tower, waiting his cruel fate, he had written to 
 her " with the dying hand of sometime thy husband, now 
 alas overthrown," a letter that we may well remember 
 here. " Time and death call me away," he wrote, while 
 waiting for the scaffold, and the words he thought would 
 be his last were these : " The everlasting, infinite, powerful, 
 and inscrutable God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, 
 the true life and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy 
 on me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and false 
 accusers; and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom. 
 My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor boy ; pray for me. 
 May true God hold you both in His arms." 
 
 Now death was beckoning him indeed, and they met 
 no more. They took him the next morning down to 
 Old Palace Yard, and there, in front of the Houses of 
 Parliament, they sacrificed to the enemies of his country 
 as noble a man as ever served a king. 
 
 There was a fire by the scaffold, but he would not 
 linger. When the end came he was glad to be gone. 
 The tragedy of his life had lasted long enough. Three 
 lords came to the scaffold to shake hands with him, and 
 he made a speech in which he prayed that God should 
 blot him out of the Book of Life if he had ever been dis- 
 loyal to the King. He entreated that all would join with 
 him in prayer to that great God in heaven whom he had 
 grievously offended, " being a man full of all vanity, who 
 hath lived a sinful life in such callings as have been most
 
 THE MATCHLESS HERO OF THE ISLAND 77 
 
 inducing to it," for he had been a soldier, a sailor, and a 
 courtier, all of them courses of wickedness and vice. " But 
 I trust He will not only cast away my sin, but will receive 
 me into everlasting life," he said; and then, looking for 
 the last time on the faces of his countrymen, he said, 
 " I have a long journey to take, and must bid the company 
 farewell." Two blows from the headsman, and Raleigh 
 had passed into his immortality. 
 
 The crowd turned away with a thrill of anguish and 
 shame. His widow buried his body in St. Margaret's 
 Church across the way, but his head she embalmed and 
 kept through her long years of widowhood. 
 
 So perished the victim of Philip and James, the 
 patriot and dreamer of the English-speaking race. As 
 for those who slew him, they lived on. Stukely lived an 
 outcast, shunned by all, and died a maniac, haunted by the 
 face of Walter Raleigh, in the lonely island of Lundy, 
 where he hid himself from men. Lord Cobham, who 
 betrayed him for a thousand pieces of gold, died in poverty 
 and filth, being long kept alive by an old servant who fed 
 him with scraps. James, of whom Macaulay said that he 
 was a nervous, drivelling idiot, continued to degrade the 
 crown until he died. 
 
 Such were the men who hounded to his doom the 
 matchless hero of our Island, the founder of our British 
 Commonwealth. They lie in the dust of oblivion, while he 
 shines eternal, like the very stars of God.
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 
 
 What do they know of England 
 Who only England know ? 
 
 THEY know little indeed, for would you know England 
 you must know not only these little islands, this little 
 patch of red that is almost lost in the map of the world ; 
 would you know England you must know more than these 
 few millions of people cut off from the mainland of Europe 
 when the waves of the Atlantic gathered about these hills 
 a million years or so ago. 
 
 Would you know England? Then look across the 
 world; follow the sun by day and night, for his shining 
 glory never falls upon the earth but it lights upon some 
 work our Island did. Round the whole planet you must 
 go would you know England, and all that she has done for 
 men. 
 
 But for all of us who can walk, and are healthy, and 
 can see, there is one great thing we can do; there is one 
 glorious hour that we can live in the very heart of very 
 England, in the most sacred piece of English earth enclosed 
 within the seas, the little piece of earth made holy for 
 ever by the feet of the dreamers and founders and builders 
 of the Island and all that she has meant to men. 
 
 We can come to London on some golden day in June, 
 we can go to the foot of Nelson's column in Trafalgar 
 Square, and we can look down Whitehall to Westminster. 
 
 78
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 79 
 
 We are looking down a great highway where angels would 
 tread lightly if they came, for here, in the few hundreds 
 of yards of earth before our eyes, is packed more of 
 England than in any other space so small. Here is 
 enshrined more of the life of her immortal men than any- 
 where else on earth; here for a thousand years has beat 
 the heart of this free land that nursed and cradled Liberty. 
 Let us take a walk down Whitehall. 
 
 Behind us, in the long low galleries that mark the 
 northern boundary of Trafalgar Square, Art reigns in 
 its proud realm. Great pictures that men will look on for 
 ever are here; and here too, close to this very heart of 
 England, we can walk about for an hour and see our 
 great men as they were Tennyson as he walked on the 
 heather at Blackdown; Cromwell as he stood not far 
 from here and refused the crown; Darwin who watched 
 the flowers grow in his garden and read Nature's secrets 
 in them. But we leave this kingdom of fine things, we 
 leave the great space and the splendid fountains, we cross 
 the shadow the Nelson Column throws across the road, 
 and we are in Whitehall itself, and at the very first inch 
 of it we are in touch with the power that has grown up in 
 these islands through a thousand years. 
 
 It is the power that guards the freedom of the world. 
 Here, in the building with which Whitehall begins as we 
 go down on the right, is the hand and brain that controls 
 the British Fleet. A quaint old-fashioned little building 
 it is, but come round the corner, through the glorious 
 Arch that runs into the Mall and the little Green Park. 
 Now we feel that old times have passed away, for on our 
 left, as we look down to the King's palace half a mile 
 away, the old-fashioned Admiralty grows into a great
 
 80 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 modern place, rising magnificently in the wide space 
 behind the Horse Guards, and we feel that this home of 
 the Fleet is something like the Fleet itself. For our fleet 
 began with little boats pulled with oars; it grew up with 
 the curious sort of ships that carried Martin Frobisher to 
 unknown seas and Francis Drake around the world; it 
 grew strong in the days when Robert Blake would call 
 to see Cromwell in the Council-room still standing in this 
 street ; it came sailing with the wind into the Age of Steam 
 and grew to be the greatest power the hands of men have 
 made ; and today the kings and governments and peoples 
 of the world bow down to it as the guardian of liberty 
 and the saviour of mankind. 
 
 And so there is something not unfitting in the way 
 the old Admiralty creeps out into the park and becomes a 
 fine place there. It keeps watch there over the Prime 
 Minister's back garden and the King's front gate; it 
 guards the people's great highway; it looks across to the 
 room where ambassadors from all the world consult our 
 England, and it bows down, as it were, to Nelson's Column, 
 for he looks down from his height as if for ever he were 
 keeping watch upon his own. It is said that in the little 
 old building, long ago, a man going in to see " My Lords " 
 passed another man coming out ; and the man going in was 
 Wellington and the man coming out was Nelson, but 
 neither knew the other then ; and it is said that these two 
 men, so near each other in our Island story, were never 
 again so near in life as on that day, in this old place, 
 when neither knew the other. Today their spirit rules 
 in Whitehall. 
 
 When England forgets her Drakes and B lakes and 
 Nelsons she will be forgot by history. Times have changed
 
 'THAT LITTLE SPARROW. FLYING THROUGH THE GREAT HALL, HELPED TO SHAPE 
 THE COURSE OF ENGLAND'S HISTORY" 
 
 {See Page 37
 
 BERTHA, WIFE OF ETHELBERT, KING OF KENT 
 
 ETHELBURGA, DAUGHTER OF QUEEN BERTHA AND WIFE OF KING EDWIN 
 
 IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY THE MOST DRAMATIC THING IN THE 
 ISLAND WAS THE DAUNTLESS CHIVALRY OF THESE TWO WOMEN 
 
 [See Page 35
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 81 
 
 and nations and navies have changed with them, but still 
 the British Admiralty stands on the rock of liberty where 
 Drake and Nelson founded it. It is not for any selfish 
 cause that these little islands, through long toil and years 
 of sacrifice, with the courage of men who died for things 
 greater than life, have built up the power that has swept 
 the pirate from the seas for ever. We must be free or 
 die, but it is not for us alone that we have fought for 
 freedom througtTthese centuries. We would share it with 
 all other peoples, and the British Navy, if it has saved 
 the liberty of our homeland, has been no less the friend 
 of all mankind. 
 
 It seeks no territory from other nations, it imperils 
 no man's freedom, it endangers no man's life; it guards 
 the fortress of liberty here in England and the boundaries 
 of liberty wherever they may be; it keeps open the 
 ocean highways for all, and it protects the ships that pass 
 in thousands night and day. There is no freedom for 
 any nation if a tyrant holds the seas ; and until the fleet 
 of the League of Nations does this work for all, the British 
 Fleet will do it without fear and without complaining. 
 
 In a thousand ways and more the Fleet has changed 
 since the days when Drakes went out as pirates and 
 Nelsons freed the seas. A ship was a simple enough thing 
 then, an elaborate sort of box with a sail driven by the 
 wind; but what is a ship today? It is something more 
 than power, it is something we may be proud of however 
 great our ideals are. If all the nations were to pass 
 away, and all the things that men have made, and if we 
 had power to leave behind us just one thing to let the 
 future know what we could do, we could leave the future 
 nothing better for our purpose than a ship, for this great
 
 82 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 thing is a sort of concentration of all we know and all 
 we can do. Those days of war have passed away, we 
 hope, for ever now, but do you remember the wonder of 
 them all? A man saw a little black thing in the sea 
 twenty miles away. He was moving at one speed and the 
 little black thing at another; but the little black thing 
 was the enemy of freedom, and it must go ; and so a gun 
 was aimed and timed to create an explosion at the point 
 where the heart of the enemy ship would be in half a 
 minute. Winds had to be reckoned with, and the friction 
 of steel tubes, and the wear and tear of steel itself, and the 
 pull of the earth, and the speeds at which the ships were 
 moving, but the gun was fired, the shell flew twenty miles, 
 the explosion took place, and the little black thing was 
 doomed. 
 
 So near perfection is a ship that it works with the 
 exactness of a watch. It is the organisation of knowledge, 
 of science, of laws and matter, the regulation and control 
 of mechanical powers beyond all reckoning. There is in 
 it the mind of the chemist and the astronomer, the 
 physicist and the engineer, the biologist and the doctor, the 
 mathematician and the carpenter ; there is in a ship, indeed, 
 a little bit of everything ; it is the most astonishing visible 
 manifestation we have of the pure brain-power of a nation. 
 
 Let us look up, as we leave the Admiralty, at those 
 thin wires that hang above the top of it. They puzzle us 
 as they would puzzle Nelson, but we can use them in a 
 way he never dreamed of, for up there, in that thrilling 
 little dome that Mr. Stead used to call the Conning Tower 
 of the Empire, the First Lords of our Admiralty can sit 
 and be in instant touch with every British ship that sails 
 within a thousand miles, and the day is coming fast when
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 83 
 
 men will sit in this small Conning Tower and talk to an 
 admiral on his bridge wherever he may be. If the ships 
 of the Admiralty enshrine the knowledge of the past, 
 these thin wires above its roof, humming and swaying 
 in the wind, enshrine the promise of the future, for they 
 speak to us who pass by of the days that are coming when 
 men will talk to anywhere, when the power of the human 
 voice, and perhaps the power of human vision, will throw 
 itself across the earth. Then distance will no longer add 
 confusion to our vews ; we shall talk with each other and 
 understand, and there will be no more wars; and the 
 great building with the lovely domes that we now reach 
 in Whitehall will then be no more a War Office, but a 
 Peace Office. We stand looking at it from the barracks of 
 the Horse Guards, on the spot where Philip Sidney used to 
 tilt before he died for England's sake; and we know that 
 in this place there was achieved, in those red years of 
 war, an amazing revolution. In twenty months it turned 
 a peaceful citizen nation into one of the military strong- 
 holds of Europe. 
 
 If the catastrophe that overtook the world found the 
 War Office unequal to its task, that was hardly more than 
 could be said of any other human institution. It is the 
 genius of Whitehall that its instruments of government 
 are ready for the people when they want them. There 
 may be something wrong, screws loose and handles 
 missing, but there is that in freedom that will take these 
 instruments of government as they are and use them well. 
 The Machine is here in Whitehall, the power to drive it is 
 in the liberty that runs through every town and hamlet 
 in these islands, and somehow England with her liberty 
 muddles through to everlasting fame.
 
 84 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 But we must guard our liberty unceasingly, and 
 Whitehall speaks for ever of the lengths to which this 
 nation will go in guarding what is all in all. Looking 
 down Whitehall is the figure of a man on horseback. 
 There are men who would go a thousand miles to see it, 
 so famous is it as a work of art ; it is said that Cromwell's 
 Parliament ordered its destruction, but that somebody 
 hid it and brought it out again in safer days. Now 
 nobody throws a stone at it; we are so strong in our 
 freedom that we can look a traitor in the face and not be 
 afraid. And Charles Stuart was a traitor. He lied to 
 the nation about its solemn affairs as a thief about his gains. 
 He gave his word again and again and broke it like a 
 kaiser. He accepted mercy from a trusting Parliament 
 and paid it back in bitterness. He exhausted the patience 
 of all good men and made the government of England 
 impossible as long as he was alive. 
 
 And so he had to go; and here he sits on his horse, 
 looking down on the very room from which he passed to 
 die. He walked down Whitehall in a long black coat 
 and with a rich red waistcoat ; he walked into the Banquet- 
 ing Room of old Whitehall Palace, standing to this day 
 as it stood then; he walked under the doorway and 
 through the hall where anyone of us can walk for sixpence 
 now, and through the window of this hall he walked on 
 to a scaffold. There was a great groan from the thousands 
 of people in the street, but Cromwell's soldiers soon 
 dispersed them; and, whatever doubts men may have 
 had then, there are no doubts now that Cromwell was 
 right. It is said that he came into Whitehall in the 
 dark of night, a stern and muffled figure, made his way to 
 the room where the dead king lay, and stood for a time
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 85 
 
 by the coffin. " A terrible necessity," he muttered to 
 himself, and history knows that it was true. 
 
 Across the road from this tragic window a little office 
 stands between the people and the throne. No man has 
 yet been born on earth who should have power to rule a 
 nation by himself; and so there are gathered about the 
 king the members of the Privy Council, the men we call 
 Right Honourables. They are chosen by the king to 
 serve him while he lives, and they pledge themselves to 
 guard him and advise him, according to their wisdom and 
 discretion, for his own honour and the good of the people, 
 without bias through affliction or need or doubt or dread ; 
 they pledge themselves to keep his counsels secret and 
 to avoid corruption; to help and strengthen the good 
 work of the realm, and to withstand its enemies; and 
 to observe, keep, and do all that a good and faithful 
 councillor should do to his sovereign lord. 
 
 It is this council of about a hundred men, with its 
 little office in Whitehall, that proclaims the king on his 
 accession, and makes known his wishes to the nation. 
 As laws are passed for whole nations and may be hard 
 sometimes on individuals, so they are passed for general 
 purposes and may miss particular cases; and so there is 
 sometimes issued an Order in Council. 
 
 The Privy Council which issues these Orders is like 
 a little Parliament gathered about the king. Its power is 
 very limited, and can be exercised only by permission 
 of Parliament itself; the Order in Council is, indeed, the 
 way in which the British Parliament acts quickly in 
 emergencies. There may be cattle plague in Europe, 
 and it is of profound importance to us all that stricken 
 cattle should not be landed at our ports. But such a law,
 
 86 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 clearly, cannot be made by Parliament : there is no time, 
 and in any case such laws as these must change from 
 week to week or day to day, for plague may be in Norway 
 one day and not there the next ; and while it may be safe 
 to import cattle from Belgium it may be dangerous to 
 import them from Sweden. So an Order in Council is 
 issued to cover such emergencies, or to add particular 
 cases to general laws that Parliament has already passed. 
 Parliament has, for example, declared that certain birds 
 shall not be shot or robbed in certain seasons, and an 
 Order in Council may add new birds to the list. 
 
 It is easy to see how there grew out of the Privy 
 Council one of the best known of all our instruments of 
 government. If we walk down Whitehall just a little 
 farther we come to the narrow way on the right which 
 is called Downing-street, and in it are two shabby houses 
 built of red brick, with the dust of perhaps a hundred 
 years or so upon them. Nobody would choose them to live 
 in because they are good houses. They tuck them- 
 selves away behind the great magnificence of Whitehall, 
 and they have little back gardens such as you find in 
 Brixton; and yet a man would rather live here than 
 anywhere else in the Island, for in the first of these houses 
 lives the Prime Minister, and in the next lives one of his 
 right-hand men. 
 
 In the Prime Minister's dingy house sits the Cabinet, 
 the twenty men, or thereabouts, who hold the chief 
 offices in the Government. It is often said that the 
 Cabinet has no place in the British Constitution, but there 
 is little in that, because no man has seen the British 
 Constitution. It does not exist in any form in which it can 
 be shown. It has never been printed, it has never been
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 87 
 
 written; it has grown up, with Jack and Jill, and music, 
 and the love of animals, and the story of the Old Woman 
 who Lived in a Shoe. Nobody can tell you where they 
 came from or how they came, but they are here, and they 
 will stay. Perhaps we should not be so free if everything 
 were written down; perhaps we should be limited and 
 confined and in a sort of cage if we were ruled by a written 
 constitution which would have to be re-written as times 
 and manners changed. 
 
 The Cabinet is the governing body of England. The 
 people elect the Parliament, and the leader of the party 
 that is successful at the polls becomes First Minister. He 
 chooses his chief ministers from members of the House 
 of Commons and the House of Lords, and from these he 
 chooses his most trusted advisers, who form the Cabinet. 
 With the majority of the House of Commons behind 
 them they rule the State; they can close our shops at 
 six o'clock, compel our children to stay at school till they 
 are fourteen, make us insure against sickness, double the 
 price of matches, set up parish councils or pull down 
 parish pumps, and raise an army of four million men to 
 fight our enemies. They have more power than the 
 king, for the king does as the Cabinet tells him. 
 
 Perhaps once a week when Parliament is sitting the 
 Cabinet Council meets, and in anxious times the spirit 
 of the nation is reflected in the Council room. None of us 
 will ever know the whole truth about those fateful weeks 
 in the summer of 1914, when twenty men in Downing- 
 street met day after day in the shadow the Great War 
 cast before it. The strain of the terrible decision was 
 almost too great to bear. This Cabinet had the power 
 of England in its hands, the power of the British Empire,
 
 88 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 the power of a quarter of the human race, and the whole 
 face of the earth was to change if it threw it in the scale. 
 If it chose Peace, the brutal power of Prussia would be 
 dominant in Europe, and the attack on the Island would 
 come when we had no strong allies ; if the Cabinet chose 
 War, millions of men must die. 
 
 That was the alternative for the Island, and in all its 
 story there has been no gadder day. We have thought of 
 the British Fleet as the concentration of the brain power 
 of the nation : we may speak of this British Cabinet in 
 those days as the heart of a nation bowed down. It did 
 what the nation expected it to do ; it carried on the great 
 tradition of a thousand years ; it answered tyranny with 
 liberty, it hurled defiance at dishonour ; it set out into the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death because it could do no other. 
 
 So the beating life of a nation reflects itself and 
 organises itself in one little room. We come back from 
 Downing-street, on into the spacious ways of West- 
 minster, and about us rise the great offices of government. 
 The members of the Cabinet leave the Prime Minister in 
 his dingy little house, and come back to these enormous 
 buildings with the stately fronts. Behind these walls 
 the government of the United Kingdom goes on; nor 
 does the work stop here, for beyond these islands is an 
 empire, outside the empire are scores of States and nations, 
 and here are happening things that matter to them all. 
 
 To those of us who think of England as she will be the 
 last great block of buildings in Whitehall brings up a 
 vision that thrills us through and through. You will 
 find on one door Board of Education and on another 
 Ministry of Health. More perhaps than any other block 
 of buildings in these islands, these offices shape and mould
 
 HIS MIND WOULD TRAVEL WITH THE WAVES FAR OUT ON THE VOYAGE OF HIS DREAMS 
 
 [See Page 71
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 89 
 
 our destinies. The minds of little children are in their 
 keeping; it is their sacred trust to guard the bodies of 
 the people, too. What we think and what we are, whether 
 we are strong in mind and strong in body or feeble in 
 both, is largely for these offices to decide. 
 
 The Board of Education has control of our schools 
 and the spending of millions of money though not nearly 
 millions enough for developing the mental power of the 
 little men and women who will rule this land tomorrow. 
 All over the country are our schools, with thousands 
 teaching and millions learning, and it is here in Whitehall 
 that the presiding mind of this World of Mind looks out 
 upon it all and sees that the things we teach our children 
 are great and broad and good and true. There is much 
 that the Board of Education has yet to do : it has yet 
 to stop the tragic mistake we make of driving our children 
 from schools to mills and factories and mines just when 
 they are really beginning to learn; but Whitehall moves 
 only very little faster or is it very little slower ?^ than 
 the people, and a governing machine will only move 
 with the power a nation puts inside it. 
 
 One great example we have had of this in our schools. 
 For years, in this rich country, millions of children have 
 been at school with weak and hungry little bodies, with 
 disease creeping into them, sapping the strength that 
 these offices are supposed to be building up; but it was 
 not until the War Office found our men unfit for war that 
 it woke up the Education Office across the road to send 
 its doctors through the schools and put things right. 
 And now that splendid work is being done. It is the 
 business of the Ministry of Health to make this land a 
 clean and decent place to live in, to clean out our foul
 
 90 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 slums, to see that babies do not die from ignorance or 
 neglect, to see that the water supply is pure, that fresh 
 air runs through houses, that streets are paved and clean, 
 and that the laws for guarding the health of the people 
 are properly kept. It is to have, in the years to come, 
 a register of health for every British citizen. 
 
 Close about these offices the wheels of other machines 
 go round. If a nation's work is to go on, the Treasury 
 must find the money, and we must be at peace. The war 
 that goes on everlastingly within a nation must be kept 
 in bounds; those enemies of their own country who kill 
 and steal and destroy, who abuse the liberty of which 
 they are unworthy, must be kept in control. So we 
 must have our police, with our network of courts and 
 prisons for deciding justice and punishing the guilty. 
 And not only must a nation guard itself against its con- 
 scious criminals, but it must guard its people against the 
 selfishness of those who wrong their country without 
 thinking men who would keep people working in an 
 unhealthy mill or in a dangerous mine, or who, to save 
 the cost of buying a new machine, would allow a woman 
 to lose her arm. Somebody must see that buildings are 
 safe, that theatres and halls have plenty of wide ways 
 out, that fire appliances are ready in good order, that 
 bridges are strong, and vehicles well made, and railways 
 tested every day. 
 
 The world seems quiet and safe to us in ordinary times, 
 but it is quiet and safe because somebody is always 
 watching, always keeping guard, driving back a thief 
 who may creep up to our house or plague that may creep 
 up to our ports, and saving us from carelessness that may 
 lead to pain and death. It is the Home Office who looks
 
 THE VERY HEART OF THE ISLAND 91 
 
 after most of these things, and with the Home Secretary, 
 in this realm of law, we must think of the Lord Chancellor, 
 the keeper of the fount of justice. It is he who guards 
 the Great Seal which is fixed to our laws; he appoints 
 all magistrates, and shares with the Prime Minister in 
 appointing all judges ; and once a judge has been appointed 
 the king himself cannot remove him, nor the Government 
 itself, without direct permission from Parliament. Perhaps 
 the greatest thing in any land is the love of justice, and 
 it runs from end to end of ours ; it follows the flag wherever 
 it flies. There is something beautiful in the thought that the 
 Lord Chancellor is the guardian of all infants and helpless 
 people; it is his trust to see that justice and mercy are 
 shown to all who cannot appeal for themselves. 
 
 Through the whole world this British spirit runs. 
 There would be no end to our walk down Whitehall if we 
 stopped at every place and thought of what it means, 
 but we must call, however long it takes us, at those great 
 offices which stand for the thought with which we began 
 the great work of the Island in the four quarters of the 
 world. Here is the Colonial Office, which must change 
 its name for one more worthy of this wider and stronger 
 and deeper empire. Here is the India Office, with its 
 splendid rooms and its spacious courts, worthy of the 
 splendid empire that more and more becomes the crown 
 of Britain overseas. Here is the Foreign Office, looking 
 out on Peace itself, on perhaps the loveliest natural 
 scene in London that any Government Office looks upon. 
 
 They come together in one mighty sweep of buildings 
 at the end of Whitehall, and facing them, behind shabby 
 walls unworthy of its greatness, the Board of Trade 
 peers out from across the road.
 
 92 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 England has well been said to be a mine, a factory, and 
 a market-place. Here trade has grown to bounds undreamed 
 of. It covers the whole wide world, it deals in all known 
 things. Not a thing the earth produces, not an article 
 that men make, not a coin that people use, is outside 
 our British market-place. Our ships sail all the seas, 
 our ports receive the ships of all the world, and in our 
 docks the world exchanges goods. It is the Board of 
 Trade that deals with these things, that keeps accounts 
 with other countries and controls our merchant fleet, 
 and does a hundred other things that most of us would 
 hardly dream of. It will organise an exhibition, will 
 put up a new lighthouse, will send a lifeboat to a wreck, 
 and will send out regulations for controlling mussel beds 
 or Mauretanias. But the great work of the Board of 
 Trade is the work that takes it out into the world, and so 
 it shares our Empire dreams as it looks across at this 
 fine range of buildings that embraces all the British 
 Empire and the world without it. 
 
 Across the way is Parliament, with Cromwell guarding 
 it still. The great shadow falling on its walls on a 
 summer's day comes from Westminster Abbey, the 
 solemn gathering-place of England for these thousand 
 years. Here, on this earth that lies about us, behind 
 these very walls, men have fought and thought and 
 prayed and dreamed for England : here, in these homes of 
 government that line the way through Whitehall, men are 
 working and dreaming for her still. 
 
 For our Great Mother goes on and on, and through the 
 ages, while lesser spirits come and go, her soul will be 
 strong, her spirit will be free, and her power will ride the 
 seas as in the days of old.
 
 II 
 
 SCENES IN 
 THE GLORY OF THE ISLAND
 
 Ever the faith endures, 
 
 England, my England ! 
 Take and break us we are yours, 
 
 England, my own ! 
 Life is good, and joy runs high 
 Between English earth and sky ; 
 Death is death ; but we shall die 
 To the song on your bugles blown, 
 
 England 
 To the stars on your bugles blown ! 
 
 W. E. Henley
 
 THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND 
 
 A million men of the flag sleep out in France, the brightest, 
 noblest, fairest manhood of our Island race. 
 
 Down the roads of Kent they went, the flower of our 
 manhood, to guard the Island once again. What a way they 
 went, and what a thrill of glory must have come to them in 
 their last hour of England ! 
 
 The last piece of England they passed through, the last 
 of the Island they saw, the gateway through which strong 
 men passed with tears and pride and faith and hope 
 what kind of place is this Kent ? What did they see, these 
 men, in their last hour of this enchanted land ? 
 
 They saw as fair a sight as God has given to men on 
 earth the pleasant, spacious plain of Kent. They saw 
 a land that was a kingdom before a Caesar ruled in Rome. 
 They saw the ancient heart of England that never yet 
 has beat except with pride, through all the thousand 
 years of England's story. They saw the face of our 
 Island as fair and sweet as it was yesterday, undimmed 
 by tears through all the trials of the years. 
 
 They saw her gazing proudly from the hills, and 
 resting gently in the valleys, brooding, in her ancient 
 haunts, over the long, long Past that has made her and 
 shaped her and strengthened her for all that may betide; 
 they saw her smiling in the fields of gold that lie in the 
 setting sun; they saw the towers that rise to heaven and 
 seem to call her upward when her heart is heavy and 
 
 95
 
 96 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 bowed down. They saw the great unfolding of the ages 
 past, the great unrolling of the map of Freedom's Island. 
 The wind blows through the trees, the cattle low in the 
 meadows, and children are laughing at their play; the 
 countryside endures, and the call that comes to us all is 
 to see that, through good and ill, the happy days of the 
 Island shall go on. 
 
 He who loves England and leaves it by the gate of 
 Kent takes with him where he goes a memory that will 
 not pass away. In foreign lands he will remember these 
 green fields and pleasant ways. Among strange scenes he 
 will think of this wide plain with its quiet homes, its 
 winding streams, and the pastures Sidney Cooper loved. 
 Far away, at the foot of some great campanile, his mind 
 will come again to these grey square towers that have 
 seen the centuries go by, and he will think of the life of 
 the Island that has gone quietly on from age to age; 
 of the little children who played among the daisies, of the 
 boys and girls who grew up and loved each other, of the 
 men and women who toiled and built up happy homes, 
 and of those who lay down to rest in the little churchyard 
 believing that all is well. 
 
 Nowhere is the thread that runs through England's 
 life more plain to see; nowhere more than in Kent does 
 the heart leap up when we behold the sunshine in the 
 sky. Between two lines of hills it lies, between two 
 spurs of the distant Alps that stretch towards us through 
 the narrow sea, and encompass, within themselves and 
 about themselves, a million people in a million acres of 
 the loveliest region of our earth. 
 
 Stirring and splendid it is, fit gateway for heroes to 
 pass through, instinct with the softness that sets us
 
 TWELVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO OLD BEDE SAT IN HIS SCHOOL AT JARROW. TEACHING 
 THE BOYS OF THE ISLAND THE THINGS THAT WERE TO MAKE THE ISLAND GREAT 
 
 [S Past 43
 
 OLDER THAN THE FLAG ARE THESE WORKS OF MEN'S HANDS THAT STAND ABOUT THE 
 ISLAND- ST. MARTIN'S CROSS, WHICH HAS STOOD ON 1ONA ISLAND SINCE THE EARLY 
 
 DAYS OF CHRISTIANITY THERE 
 
 |S Chattier I
 
 97 
 
 dreaming, yet with something as of a giant refreshed after 
 long sleep. How there comes to us, down these old 
 roads of Kent, the call to be great and strong ! How 
 we seem to hear, down these ages of Time, the echoing 
 tramp of the armies of the people ! 
 
 Across the valley, almost the other day it seems, I 
 stood and watched a long white line : it was a train 
 crowded with heroes. They were on their way to win 
 the noblest crown that war can give a man, and they 
 had come down the road that saw the Romans pass, 
 through the heart of a hill that knew Canute and threw 
 its shadow on the field in which he fought the Danes. 
 Hardly were they out of London when they were in the 
 battlefields of Kent, riding through the great scenes of 
 our Island story to write the greatest page of all in her 
 solemn and wonderful book. Along these ways from 
 London to the sea, off the roads that lead to where Kent 
 touches nearest France, the first battles of the English 
 were fought. Here were driven back the first invaders; 
 here grew up that spirit of the English people which has 
 guarded these islands and kept them free. Here the 
 men of a kingdom older than Caesar drove armed chariots 
 into the sea and hurled back Caesar's army. Little we 
 know of these men, but they laid the foundations of 
 society in these islands, and the mark of their lives is on 
 the face of Kent to this day. 
 
 And so our warriors passed out by the Warrior's Way. 
 By a roadside, as they ride towards Dover, they might 
 have passed the oldest soldier's grave in England. Stand- 
 ing in a field, on the slope of a mighty hill, are four great 
 stones, three upstanding, and the biggest of all on top. 
 They are part of the long story of the Island ; they raise 
 
 ii
 
 98 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 the sense of wonder in our minds as the Pyramids of 
 Egypt do; and we have no doubt that there lies here 
 an ancient British general, fighting and dying among his 
 people before Christ died on Calvary. 
 
 And so Kit's Coty House, this wayside tomb that 
 marks our Warrior's Way, is like a thrill from the past 
 to the hero who goes by and understands. It is among 
 the oldest works of man in the Island; perhaps it may 
 be the very oldest monument now standing on our soil. 
 The miles of stone that made an avenue from this monu- 
 ment to another tomb at Addington have disappeared, 
 but the ancient tenant of Kit's Coty House sleeps in a 
 worthy tomb. Behind him rise the great North Downs; 
 below him runs the river; at the foot of his hill lies the 
 battlefield on which the blood of Englishmen first mingled 
 with our English earth. 
 
 So there is gathered about this Warrior's Way a 
 storied past that moves a man to solemn thought. Kit's 
 Coty's soldier who was he ? At the foot of the hill where 
 he sleeps, an old stone bridge has carried men across the 
 river for nearly five hundred years. In this red-roofed 
 village of Aylesford, as picturesque a place as any Island 
 river ripples through, are many things to stir a traveller's 
 thought, and this old bridge not least; but the thing 
 that gives Aylesford its immortal place in the history of 
 the world is a thing invisible, a thing that happened one 
 great day, long after Kit's Coty's soldier fell asleep, when 
 Horsa, having landed at Ebbsfleet with Hengist, reached 
 this ford. 
 
 No man then had heard the name of England, but the 
 Britons who had seen the Romans come and go were 
 faced now with an invasion that was to change their
 
 THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND 99 
 
 land for ever. The conquerors of Britain had arrived; 
 in the plain be ] ow Kit's Coty House, where Aylesford 
 Bridge crosses the Medway and Aylesford Church sits 
 high above the gabled roofs, the English fought and won. 
 Horsa fell in his hour of triumph, the first great English 
 soldier to lie in English earth; but Kent was conquered, 
 and the conquest of the Island was begun. There was 
 sown that day, in the beautiful garden of Aylesford, 
 the seed of English power that has grown and spread 
 throughout the earth. 
 
 We cannot wonder that the very air of Kent should 
 seem to beat with pride at the thought of England and 
 all that she has been. The birthplace of English power, 
 the one province of Britain that has always kept its name, 
 Kent may be proud without apology. She is old, so old 
 that the sea has run out from some of her ports and 
 swallowed up some of her towns; so old that her island 
 of Thanet has ceased to be an island through the drying 
 up of a river; so old that there lived here, at Galley 
 Hill on the Thames, one of the oldest men whose remains 
 have been found; so old that on the hills of Ightham 
 Mr. Benjamin Harrison has found the oldest witnesses 
 upon the earth to the handiwork of man. But Kent, if 
 she is old, is more beautiful for every year that goes; 
 no county in these islands has made itself so famous, has 
 clothed itself with such great glory, has brought to its 
 gates such an assemblage of immortals, as this kingdom 
 of wonder called Kent. 
 
 If we think of her natural glories, her heights, though 
 they may be matched, are unsurpassed. The great plat- 
 forms of the North Downs, at Westerham and Wrotham, 
 at Charing 'and Sevenoaks, open up for us impressive
 
 100 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 views of England that fix themselves for ever in the mind. 
 And who that has been through her country lanes can 
 forget the peeps through her hedges and gateways, like 
 glimpses of heaven itself to the passer-by in a motor-car ? 
 The ride through the narrow lanes, with hedges standing 
 like houses, with the engine panting as if such a hill made 
 even an iron horse tired, is something to live for in Kent, 
 where the sudden turning of a corner or a break in the 
 hedge opens out before us a hundred miles of woodland 
 and pasture and heath, with commons perhaps ablaze 
 with gold, with bracken and broom that seem unending, 
 with clematis and wild roses and ragged robin near at 
 hand and spacious fields of waving corn beyond, with 
 beeches and birches and oaks from the days of the great 
 forests, with the sunlight dancing on the rivers, with the 
 grey church towers and the yews of a thousand years. 
 
 You should have seen that long hill range 
 
 With gaps of brightness riven, 
 How through each pass and hollow streamed 
 
 The purpling lights of heaven. 
 
 Rivers of gold mist flowing down 
 
 From far celestial fountains, 
 The great sun flaming through the rifts 
 
 Beyond the wall of mountains. 
 
 The great forests have gone from Kent, cut down for 
 the iron furnaces that have also gone, but there are a hundred 
 thousand acres of woodland still, and we may wander 
 freely through most of them. But it is the great spaces 
 that surprise the traveller in Kent; one-half of all Kent 
 is pasture land, and there are more cattle and sheep grazing 
 on it every day than there are people in Kent houses.
 
 THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND 101 
 
 And if we think of the glorious things set up by men, 
 where on British soil have men built more splendidly than 
 in Kent? Here built Gundulf the Norman; here Lan- 
 franc set up his mighty works; here we meet Chantrey 
 and Inigo Jones ; here are barns which once were palaces ; 
 here rise houses and towers and village halls enough to 
 make a whole country envious. Is there any little walk 
 in England more moving in its appeal than among the 
 ruined walls of Canterbury, with the sun falling on the 
 Gothic arches, and on the solitary columns that rise from 
 the green lawns in the cathedral close ? Is there any 
 structure more imposing in its dignity than the Keep 
 at Rochester, older than the Conqueror? All along the 
 Warrior's Way lie these noble ruins, broken halls of kings 
 and prelates, and they stand in the fields as if to mark 
 the passing of the centuries as a clock marks the passing 
 of the hours. 
 
 Time has been gracious to the glory of Kent. Her 
 ancient towns stand still as they stood in ages beyond 
 the memory of man; in Maidstone and Rochester and 
 Canterbury we walk and wonder if modern Time is really 
 twenty centuries old. We should hardly be surprised at 
 Rochester if the Frenchman who founded Parliament in 
 England rode into the cathedral on his horse as he rode 
 seven centuries ago; or if a chest were opened in this 
 great place and found to contain the muskets and powder- 
 flasks of Cromwell's men, as one was found in other days. 
 
 But if Rochester is old, what shall we say of Canter- 
 bury ? We can say only that it is old beyond our thoughts, 
 and beautiful beyond our dreams. 
 
 No words can tell the glory of the sight that comes 
 into our gaze as we walk through the old cathedral gate. A
 
 102 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 temple not made with hands alone is here, set up between 
 heaven and earth, a gigantic monument of stone as lovely 
 as a little child. How it has woven itself into our history 
 all the school books tell : how Thomas Becket walked 
 one night through these very cloisters into this transept, 
 and was seized and murdered by the king's men on this 
 very spot; how the king came here, on the bitterest 
 journey ever taken by a King of England, and was flogged 
 for all the world as if he were penitent of his crime ; how 
 pilgrims from all Europe came to this famous shrine, 
 with Chaucer and his merry story-tellers along the Pilgrim 
 Way. 
 
 We have seen the birthplace of the English nation at 
 Aylesford, half-way on the road from London Town to 
 Canterbury ; now we see the chief birthplace of Christianity 
 in the Island. This Warrior's Way is rich in the most 
 sacred soil we tread. 
 
 Rich is it, too, in homes, in houses great and small, 
 that seem too splendid to be true. They stand and stare 
 at the modern world like giants and children of another 
 age; they look out across parks to the great main roads, 
 and burst upon our sight with startling suddenness. 
 They give a sense of wonder to the old, old road, as if the 
 feudal lords had come again, or as if some magic story had 
 come true. He who rides by road to Dover, though he 
 may go through Maidstone by the Warrior's Way and come 
 to the heaven that men call Canterbury, has no moment 
 more impressive than that when, on the rise of the hill, 
 above a low stone wall on the right, the great trees open 
 out, and there stands before him, for a moment, a wonder 
 that has stood five hundred years. It is the moated 
 castle of Leeds, built about the islands used by Ethelbert
 
 THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND 103 
 
 as forts, and looking, as we pass it in a flash, like some- 
 thing that is not of this busy working world. It is one 
 of the things we gaze on with amaze. 
 
 And all within our reach from here, in a day's ride 
 through this ancient land, lie the great houses of Knole 
 at Sevenoaks, sheltered by age-old trees and packed with 
 rare and precious things ; of Penshurst, where Philip 
 Sidney played as a boy and grew to be a man ; of Hever, 
 where we may fancy we catch the merry laugh of a little 
 girl named Anne Boleyn; the small house at Westerham, 
 where Wolfe grew up; and that perfect piece of building 
 that we call Ightham Mote. If we would sit and dream 
 of lovely things and beautiful places until there comes 
 into our mind the vision of an earthly paradise, the vision 
 of this world as it shall be when there are no more wars 
 and no more sorrow and no more sin if we would dream 
 of earth as angels dream of it perhaps, if we would see 
 its haunts of ancient peace as perhaps they once have 
 been and may be once again we have but to turn the 
 corner of a lane which brings us to Ightham Mote. 
 
 It may be strange to say of a building that it looks 
 silent and still, but so still is the world at Ightham Mote 
 that we tread as in a cathedral aisle, lest the silence of 
 ages should be broken. Like a jewel set by Nature 
 among her trees and hills, the Mote has stood five hundred 
 years and more, a home through all these centuries and 
 still a home today, perhaps as beautiful a house not too 
 big, not too forbidding as any country in the world can 
 show. Small enough to be homely, Ightham Mote is still 
 a home rather than a mere museum, and its dainty drawing- 
 room is not less comfortable because it is a cameo of perfect 
 beauty. Its Chinese wallpaper, hand-painted centuries
 
 104 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 ago in the mysterious East that had not yet met the West, 
 is still on the walls where it has been two hundred years. 
 
 But it is the view that all the world can see that 
 draws the traveller here, the sight of this enchanted place 
 that seems to have grown up with the hills. No picture 
 can show it as it is, rising from its moat of ever-running 
 water in a natural setting that nothing can surpass. The 
 glorious yews and firs, the green lawn bordered with 
 its timbered cottages, the beech hedges twenty feet high, 
 the sheltered lake that holds the water for a while as it 
 runs to the Medway in scenes like this stands this old 
 home, seeming to belong to Time itself. 
 
 Through these great scenes our heroes passed, often 
 not knowing; and perhaps, forsooth, a man on his way 
 to France or to Gallipoli was hardly in the mood for 
 scenes like these. But he could hardly fail to love the 
 cottage homes, the white timbered cottages with the 
 thatched roofs, the old houses with the red gables, the 
 houses with the long, low rooms, in which, as probable 
 as not, a huge trunk of oak from Kent's great forests 
 stretches across the ceiling from one end to the other. 
 And he would love to see the people at their gates, the 
 old men who have loved this countryside since they were 
 boys. The world has gone by since then, but they have 
 seen little of it; they have been sowing these fields, or 
 mending these roads, or trimming these hedges, or pruning 
 these trees, or leading the cattle home, as their fathers 
 did before them. From age to age the annals of the poor 
 go on, and the spirit of the simple folk mingles with the 
 spirit of the great. 
 
 The old road teems with the life of ages gone; go 
 where we will, the world is like a book for him who reads.
 
 THE GATEWAY OF THE ISLAND 105 
 
 Here lies an old man who saw his daughter Queen of 
 England, saw her led to the block for no sin of her own, 
 and died a pitiful broken man. In Leybourne Church, 
 so sweetly resting in the shelter of the woodland, is a 
 niche for hearts for those whose bodies lie away, but 
 whose hearts have loved this place. Over there lived 
 the first man who thought the life of Cromwell worth 
 writing in a book; across those fields a strange man 
 fumbled about for weary years with the electricity from 
 which he believed great things must come; in this church 
 sleeps a brave old man who suffered greatly because he 
 dared to petition Parliament to make haste about its 
 business, for " the men had sown their corn, and the 
 enemy was coming to reap it." So memories crowd upon 
 the road that leads out of the Island ; so in cottages and 
 palaces men leave their mark and are remembered. 
 
 Into this Kent of ours, by this Warrior's Way, comes 
 all the world. Her splendid roads, her ancient towns, 
 her noble houses, her treasures from antiquity, bring into 
 Kent all who can come in quest of happiness and inspira- 
 tion. And her hop-fields, stretching for miles and miles, 
 feeding the breweries that grow rich on the ruin of the 
 bodies and souls of men, bring into Kent the least lovely 
 of all unlovely people. She is the great highway of com- 
 munication between England and Europe; in thousands 
 of sacks the mails go out through Kent each week to the 
 countries of the Continent. She is the window from 
 which we look out on the gate of Europe ; from her high 
 cliffs we see the coast of France ; standing on her historic 
 soil we see the ships that come from every corner of the 
 earth. Nowhere else on earth can we cut ourselves off 
 more completely from the world; nowhere else on earth
 
 106 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 does the great world traffic meet as in the tide that washes 
 Kent. Down her rivers ride the world's great ships; 
 by her winding railways come to us the peoples of the 
 earth; along her matchless roads the ceaseless motor-cars 
 fly past on their way to the sea ; over her fly the aeroplanes 
 that link the Island with the Continent. 
 
 Summer days may end, but Kent is lovely still, and 
 he who leaves our Island by this way, through the gate 
 of Dover, leaves her with that vision in his mind that 
 Caesar and our heroes saw. But he leaves a kingdom 
 Caesar never knew, for he leaves a land inviolate and 
 incomparable. He who goes out by Kent's White Gate 
 sees as he goes the natural fortress of the freedom of the 
 world.
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 
 
 IT is something to have the world at your feet; it is 
 something to be a king and sit on a throne. We have 
 only to live on a hill. 
 
 Who can stand on the tops of the Island and not be 
 moved by the rolling majesty before him hills piled on 
 hills, the woodlands creeping up, the spacious fields that 
 spread until they touch the sky? Who can stand on 
 these great platforms and not be thrilled by this ever- 
 changing world the light of the sun that falls never twice 
 the same, the haze on the hills that seems to have touched 
 the rainbow, the morning light on the eastern hills and 
 the light in the west as the sun dips down beyond the 
 edge of the world? Who that loves the busy town can 
 help loving the busy country, with the pageant of life 
 that is never still, the air throbbing with music that never 
 dies, the ceaseless round of a million things that make 
 a hilltop thrill from the rising of the lark in the cornfield 
 to the wheeling round of the bats and owls when the 
 moon is up. 
 
 It is sad that there should be pity in the world for 
 those who live on the hilltops ; yet pity there is. " How 
 lonely it will be I " said everybody; and Mr. Punch has 
 pitied us, too. " Don't you find it lonely up here ? " 
 Mr. Punch asked at some hilltop house, and he must 
 have been surprised to find how small a number may 
 make a company. "No," was the answer; "there was 
 
 107
 
 108 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 a man and a horse yesterday, and there's you today." 
 But he might have been answered as Emerson would 
 have answered him : 
 
 When I would spend a lonely day, 
 Sun and moon are in my way. 
 
 There is always the sun and the moon, and the tulips 
 nodding to the daffodils. There is the partridge bringing 
 up her little ones at the side of the terrace path, the 
 goldfish leaping into the sun, and the cuckoo gossiping 
 with the nightingale. If we would be lonely we must 
 go to London, and hide ourselves among the red-brick 
 houses and the streaming people who never speak a word. 
 
 And so it came about that the house was to be set 
 on the hill, on a high hill, where no house was nor had 
 been. Up above the village, high above the steeple, 
 rising from a touch of Saxon England, looking down on 
 fifty or a hundred miles of earth, we would live where 
 the viper had lain undisturbed, where the fox had prowled 
 by night, where the rabbits and stoats and weasels had 
 hid in the growth of wild, neglected things. Out from 
 the lane we would make a winding way, and at the top, 
 when the way got there, it should find itself in a little 
 kingdom of delight, where we would live, in sun and shower, 
 in silence and storm, close as a comrade to the heart of 
 Nature, far from all stress and strife and sense of wrong. 
 
 So we dreamed (it was in the happy days before the 
 Shadow came) ; so simple folk have often dreamed before ; 
 so, in the house at the top of the hill, we dream still of 
 what might-have-been. It is always a dream a dreaming 
 and a dreaming and an ending in perhaps half of what 
 we wanted. We are only human, and we should be
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 109 
 
 divine if all our dreams came true. But we aim at a high 
 thing, and at least we hit a low thing, and so, in the end, 
 the house crept up the hill ; and the roses bloom in the old 
 sea-bed, the fire burns on the hearth in winter, and the 
 little lead windows look out across the valley. There 
 are always compensations. 
 
 And for such a task there should be compensations. 
 It is not an easy thing to take a house to the top of a 
 hill. The men and the horses must work as hard as 
 they have ever worked, and it is not inspiring to see them 
 deep to the knees in the ploughed hillside that is to be 
 turned into a garden. But it is best to begin in the 
 winter, to see the worst and know that the better is to 
 come. In climbing up the hillside of this life we need all 
 the hope that we can have to sustain us, and in climbing 
 up the hillside with a house we have need of something 
 all the time that will seem to say, " We are a little nearer 
 to the roses and the dining-room today." 
 
 How slowly the ploughed field takes to itself the 
 feeling of civilisation I It is worse, if that is possible, 
 than the buying of the land, the probing into the old 
 and yellow papers tied with red tape in the lawyer's 
 cupboard. Who really owns the land? Was it really 
 sold so many years ago, or may some owner of other 
 days appear, and claim it when the house is up? The 
 forty-eight people who owned the land in little lots so 
 long ago did they knowingly and deliberately and law- 
 fully sell their pieces and stamp their papers at Somerset 
 House, and put the seal of the Island into them ? 
 
 A bothering and wearisome thing it is for a man to 
 buy a piece of England for his own; yet how wonderful 
 a thing it is, this law of ours, this machine that runs
 
 110 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 from room to room at Somerset House in the Strand, 
 driving a plain man almost out of his wits, yet in the 
 end, when all the enquiries have been made and all the 
 papers searched, fastening his bond with the strongest 
 seal on earth the seal and sign of the thing that holds 
 together our British nation, the public law, the sense of 
 justice, the right of a man to his own. We have a greater 
 respect for British law and order, for the strong founda- 
 tions of society, when we have bought a little bit of the 
 Island for our own. 
 
 But how slowly the ploughed field takes its shape ! 
 How long it takes the horse to climb the hill 1 That way 
 up will never do; we must buy another little strip of 
 England, after all, and go up round the wood. And so 
 the lawyers must open their cupboards again, the red tape 
 is undone, the papers are all gone through once more, 
 and we must ponder over what this word means, and 
 whether there should be a comma here, and if it is safe 
 to go on building while the lawyers talk and write. We 
 go on, at any rate for who can wait for lawyers? we 
 rough out a sort of road up by the winding wood, and 
 the hundreds of tons of brick and stone, the miles of wood, 
 the sackfuls of lime, the trucks of sand, the long steel 
 girders, the thousands of tiles, creep slowly up to the 
 top, pulled up at times on a chain by an engine the horses 
 must be thankful for. And at the top of the hill, where 
 foxes and vipers and weasels have lived as if it were 
 their own domain, the transformation scene goes on. A 
 little band of patient men are moving the earth. 
 
 Most of us have not moved a ton of earth, or ten tons, 
 or a thousand; perhaps we have not climbed to the top 
 of a hill where there is not a foot of level earth to stand
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 111 
 
 upon, and begun, as these pioneers of the hilltop did, to 
 lay out a home and a garden there, to dig and shape 
 the hillside into terraces and table-tops. Perhaps we 
 have not trudged up a hill higher than a church steeple 
 at six o'clock on three hundred mornings, and dug and 
 dug, and rolled and rolled, and sown and sown, and 
 planted and planted, and watered and watered, and 
 weeded and weeded, with a few inches of soil and a 
 thousand feet of chalk beneath our feet. It is a trial of 
 human patience that only a gardener can stand, and it 
 is born of his touch, day by day through many springs 
 and winters, with the long, slow processes of Nature that 
 have never failed him yet. 
 
 Through wind and rain, in the streaming heat of 
 flaming June and in December when frost almost snaps 
 his fingers in two, he must plod and toil. In summer 
 he must dread the drought that parches up plants like 
 paper, and must pray in vain for the water that will not 
 run uphill; in winter he must pray that the rain will 
 not wash his few inches of soil down the hill, or soak 
 his skin till he shivers with the cold that may bring his 
 gardening to an end. Let us be thankful to the men who 
 make our gardens, who bring the rainbows out of heaven 
 and spread them for us at our feet. It is something 
 to make a garden ; it is a great thing to do what a gardener 
 did on Eynsford Hill to dig up an old sea-bed which 
 had never seen the sun, and cover it in a year with lawns 
 and roses. 
 
 A marvellous thing is the life that creeps about the 
 earth, climbing or delving where it will. How many 
 million times, one wonders, has the earth been round the 
 sun since our hilltop was laid down in the darkness of
 
 112 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 the ocean ? Millions of years before man the hilltop must 
 have been alive; its countless myriads of inhabitants 
 lived and died and sank to the depths of the sea, and the 
 layers of chalk were laid down. They were formed in 
 the ocean deeps vast cemeteries of once living crea- 
 tures; they were born and lived and died in the waters 
 that covered what are now green hills and valleys. They 
 never saw the sun. For ages the sun was shining, and 
 its power was falling on the earth; but the chalk on the 
 hilltop was hidden below. The sea had gone, but over 
 the chalk was spread a little layer of earth, enough to 
 cover it; first brought, perhaps, by the river that flows 
 today a hundred feet down in the valley. And yet, when 
 this chalk was brought to light, a few oats dropping from 
 the horse's bag sank into it, took root, and grew so well 
 that in a month there would soon have been a little 
 harvest if we had left it there. The first rays of the sun 
 that fell on the old sea-floor were rich enough in the 
 marvellous wealth of Nature to turn a few seeds from a 
 horse's nose-bag into a small harvest for these patient 
 friends of man without whose help our hilltop could not 
 ever be a home. 
 
 On every mountain height is rest, says Goethe, but 
 there is little rest on the hilltop while the house is creeping 
 up ; for men and horses, too, it is hard labour from morning 
 till night, from Monday to Saturday, from one month to 
 another, from the beginning of a year to the end of it. 
 How many homes, one wonders, has this home kept in 
 the building of it kept, let us hope, in comfortable 
 enjoyment of the good things of this world ? The great 
 work of the world goes on, and the good workman sets 
 up his monument and leaves his mark behind him. We
 
 FOR EVERY VICTIM OF THE GREAT PLAGUE THERE WAS A VICTIM OF THE WITCHCRAFT 
 
 LAWS. WHOSE TERROR IS OVER THESE POOR WOMEN, BROUGHT UP FROM LANCASHIRE 
 
 TO BE EXAMINED BY THE GREAT WILLIAM HARVEY (WHO SET THEM FREE) 
 
 \Sff Past 48
 
 IN THAT WORLD IN WHICH OUR GREATEST ENGLISHMAN LIVED AND MOVED 
 THE ISLAND STOOD IN CONSTANT TERROR OF DEATH. AND PLAGUE STALKED 
 THROUGH THE LAND. CUTTING DOWN MEN AND WOMEN AND LITTLE CHILDREN 
 
 Reproduced bu permission of the Artist, Mr. F. W. Topham 
 
 {Set Page 47
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 113 
 
 are not all artists now, but every man who loves his work 
 and does it well may call himself an artist if he will. 
 The man who does things well whether he is making a 
 garden, or hanging a door, or fixing a stone is a friend 
 of the race, and serves it faithfully. A king can do no 
 better than his best, and bad kings will stand beside bad 
 builders at the Day of Judgment. 
 
 The great problems of life are worked out on the 
 hilltop; here, among the loveliness of Nature, men work 
 happily and well, each contributing his share to the little 
 kingdom that is shaping round him, each leaving a mark 
 on this little bit of the Island by which he will be known 
 for good or ill. It is pleasant to think of their hammering 
 now, when the hilltop is so still. Perhaps the doing of 
 this big thing was the very best of it who know T s ? 
 
 It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, a wise 
 man said, and we travelled hopefully on our journey up 
 the hill. It was always a looking forward. The very 
 beginning of it, when the bed of the house was made, 
 and the foundations were laid, and the great stones of 
 the doorway were ready to fit in their place, was the 
 thought of the ruin of it in the days we shall not see; 
 and so we found a good tin box, and sealed it tight with 
 such things in it as seemed worth leaving there for a 
 thousand years, and built it up inside the wall. And 
 on some far-off day, when the Great War is forgotten, 
 and men are brothers, and there are no more poor, and 
 no more sick, and men love knowledge more than gold, 
 and life and duty more than all, a child of the Island, 
 perhaps, will be playing in the ruins of the hilltop and 
 will find this box, and in it will find some tokens of the 
 
 world we live in now the first pages of The Children's 
 
 i
 
 114 
 
 Encyclopedia, some memories of a red, red rose we pulled 
 that morning, and a message from the Island of these 
 days to the Island of those days to be. How strange it 
 seems now, that message of Peace, written when the 
 Shadow had not fallen on the world ; and how like a mocker 
 it lies there in its stone fastness, hidden in darkness in 
 the happy days, waiting for the light of Peace that one 
 day will shine so brightly that nothing on earth will put 
 it out again. 
 
 Now the house is slowly rising; the hillside will never 
 be the same again. For miles around the landscape of 
 this part of the Island is a little changed; a man can 
 stand twelve miles away and see this new thing rising 
 stone on stone. They are the greatest days of all, these 
 days when the house is really on the way. How quickly 
 the walls run up now ! Here is the dining-room, here the 
 library, this ladder runs upstairs; surely it will all be 
 finished in a month ? But he must be patient who would 
 build a house, and the slow time comes. But days are 
 never dull. The great game of house-building goes on, 
 and the fertility and resourcefulness of these men astonish 
 all who watch them. Their clever ways of doing things 
 appear to have no end; the book of rules for building a 
 house must be a very big one. 
 
 Life could hardly be dull with him who builds a house. 
 There are all the letters to throw on the fire from the 
 ruffians who want to lend us money; there are all the 
 letters from the people who want to insure our lives 
 until the house is finished; there are all the people to 
 listen to who know that we shall freeze in winter and 
 roast in summer, that the rain will wash our banks away, 
 that nothing will ever grow on all this chalk. Life is
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 115 
 
 crowded with variety. There are a thousand things to 
 do, and a hundred things to wait for, and surely this 
 door is in the wrong place, this ceiling is too low, and 
 these tiles will not match the curtains ? Can we really 
 do without a fireplace there ? Did we really want these 
 red-tiled window-sills ? Does that window spoil the court- 
 yard, and does the other open the right way? Was the 
 balcony a pity, after all? Will the corridor be dark? 
 So the problems crowd upon us morning, noon, and night ; 
 and we pull down and put up, and put up and pull down, 
 and wonder how and when it will all end. And for weeks 
 and weeks it seems that nothing happens. 
 
 Then, almost suddenly, the floors appear, the doors 
 are hung, and all is well. The plasterer is here, the walls 
 begin to look like walls ; soon we can open a window and 
 shut a door, learning two of life's great lessons. 
 
 It is something to stand in an actual room and look 
 through an actual window, but the thing that makes 
 life worth living now, the joy a man has never known 
 before and perhaps will never know again, is the boundless 
 sense of freedom to do what he will in his own home. 
 An Englishman's house is his wife's castle, but no man has 
 really known what freedom is until he has used the draw- 
 ing-room walls as writing-paper, or scrawled a note on a 
 door to say that the door must go to the other end of 
 the room, or ordered a fireplace to be pulled out as a 
 protest against an ugly thing. 
 
 But not for long can we taste this boundless freedom 
 to do the thing we will, for the noise in the house is dying 
 down, and the day is coming when we shall no more 
 write our letters on the walls. The door no longer opens 
 with little bits of string; we have a lock and key, and a
 
 116 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 sort of feeling of civilisation is creeping in. Water is 
 running from the taps a thrilling thing is that ! For 
 the man who builds on a hill, unless he is lucky indeed, 
 builds beyond the reach of what we call our wonderful 
 civilisation. Neither water nor light will follow him up 
 here, and he must build up a kingdom of his own, with 
 a power-house of his own, to do for him the things 
 the great world down below buys by simply paying rates 
 and taxes. Nothing do a man's rates buy for him on a 
 lonely hill; he must pay them and get no return. Not 
 even the road climbs up the hill; he must make his own, 
 and take up his engine, his dynamo, his pump, and 
 whatever other things are needed to make human life 
 worth living. It is the price he pays for a throne. 
 
 Not all the scientists there are have yet discovered 
 how to make a stream of water run uphill itself wherever 
 they want it, and not all the taxes that a man must pay 
 can bring him water to his house if the pumps of the 
 Water Board are tired and old-fashioned. And so we must 
 have a little pump, to carry 500 gallons of water up the 
 hill each day. We are not so clever as Mr. Edison, of 
 whom it is said that he has a gate very hard to open 
 somewhere on a hilltop. " Why don't you ease this 
 gate? " asked somebody, tired of pushing it open. " Not 
 likely," said Edison; "every time you open that gate 
 you pump up two gallons of water ! " 
 
 It was not quite so simple as that on the hilltop, though 
 now we can bring up 500 gallons of water in an hour by 
 touching a switch. I touch the switch, and my fine little 
 Pelapone engine is running as true as the steel it is made 
 of; it floods my house with light and fills the tanks with 
 water. How the water runs through thousands of feet
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 117 
 
 of pipe, pulled a little way, pushed a long way, and driven 
 up by an engine when we need it to run higher still; how 
 we tried this way and that way and the other way; how 
 we dug a pond high up above the steeple and found the 
 pump too small and the pipe too narrow to carry the 
 water up, and how at last we emerged from all our troubles, 
 it would fill this book to tell. 
 
 In the end, the thing a man wants, if he wants it 
 very much, can be done by thinking. If the water will 
 not come up the hill itself, fire will bring it up for us ; if 
 the Water Company will not bring the water, a little flame 
 of oil will turn a wheel and bring it up. If the Gas Com- 
 pany will not bring the gas, the little flame of oil that 
 drives the wheel that drives the dynamo will make electric 
 light worth gas a hundred times over. The time has not 
 yet come when the natural power of a hilltop can be 
 used as it falls, or the power of the sun on our five acres 
 equal, it is said, to the power of over thirty thousand 
 horses would do all the work of our engine for a year 
 while we walk to the gate; but it is something that we 
 can snatch from the invisible treasury of Nature, high up 
 on a lonely hill, power that will work for us when and as 
 we need it, cooking our dinners, cleaning our rooms, 
 pumping up the water, lighting the house by night, and 
 keeping it cool by day. 
 
 Science, if we will bid it be our handmaid, will make 
 life pleasant for us. It will keep our houses warm and 
 sweet and clean, with a stream of hot water running 
 round them in winter, and a stream of fresh air running 
 through them every hour; every moment the sweet air 
 of the hilltop comes into the house through a hundred 
 ways, flowing through the hollow walls, in the hollow
 
 118 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 foundations, and into every room. In the house and all 
 round it, over the house and under it, the fresh air runs, 
 warmed in winter as it enters. We live in a moving 
 stream, though every window in the house be shut. 
 
 A triumph of brain-power is the modern house, and a 
 triumph of energy, too. Who can measure the work, the 
 thought, put into it? Who can imagine the hopes and 
 disappointments it involves ? We may say it took the 
 toil of men for fifty thousand hours to make it, but what 
 is fifty thousand hours of human labour ? It should make 
 us pause when we think of it. A great tax on mankind 
 is this, the using up of fifty thousand hours of work. 
 What right have we to use up so much time when there 
 is so much work to do that matters more ? And what 
 might not be done in all this time if men were free to do 
 the thing they would, or able to do the thing they should ? 
 It is something to think not lightly of that all this life 
 is put into our homes. The homes of the men who made 
 this home are they happy and clean and sweet like this ? 
 In spirit and in truth our homes are paid for with the 
 lives of men. 
 
 A house is a familiar thing, and we think of it, per- 
 haps, with little imagination, but it reaches in its interest, 
 if we could follow it, deep down into human life and far 
 out into the world. From every corner of the earth 
 something has come to it. There are not many countries, 
 perhaps, that would not come somehow into the true 
 map of a house, and all the feelings that come to men 
 have centred round it in some way. 
 
 It has been a source of joy and sorrow; it has brought 
 into the world a host of memories that some will be glad 
 to remember and some will be glad to forget. It has
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 119 
 
 touched the hearts of men and drawn upon their brains. 
 It has enlisted, for its varied purposes, almost every sort 
 of workshop, almost every sort of process, that we know. 
 The bricklayer lays a brick, but the brick has a history 
 he knows little of. The engineer welds his pipes together, 
 but the things he handles have come through fires that he 
 has never seen. The carpenter nails his boards together, 
 but thinks nothing of the distant forests oversea where 
 the boards once waved so gloriously in the wind. The 
 electrician plays, as a child with a toy, with an unknown 
 power that is reshaping the world. The glazier sets his 
 little panes into grooves of lead that may have once been 
 radium so cheap today that poor men can afford it, so 
 rich in ages past that kings, had there been any, could 
 not have paid for it then. 
 
 So, out of the heart of the great world, a little world 
 has risen on the hill a home of which we know every 
 inch and corner, in which nothing at all, however hidden 
 and covered up, is unknown to us a home, let us hope, 
 that will be worthy of this natural throne. Half a million 
 things have gone to make it, half a million separate things 
 that must be handled one by one, each put well and 
 truly in its place. Still there lives on the hill, we may 
 fancy, the echo of the ringing and singing and swinging 
 of men who were happy at their labour. A happy home 
 to every one of them 1 
 
 They laid, one upon the other, 180,000 bricks. They 
 moved, to make the bed for these to rest upon and the 
 garden to surround them, four thousand tons of chalk. 
 They handled, these diggers and builders, a weight of over 
 five thousand tons. You have not weighed a house, 
 perhaps. The walls as they stand weigh five hundred
 
 120 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 tons, and they carry on the roof the weight of fifty tons 
 of tiles. There are twenty tons of wood and twenty tons 
 of stone, and one hundred and twenty tons of ballast in 
 the foundations. Look up at the roof of the next house 
 you see, and imagine the number of tiles ; there are nearly 
 forty thousand on our roof, and twenty thousand more in- 
 doors. There are two miles of roof boards and three and 
 a half miles of wooden laths to hang the tiles on nearly 
 six miles of timber altogether in the roof. There are five 
 hundred square yards of felt between the timber and the 
 tiles, so that no storm that beats on the hill will find a 
 way through there. There are a mile and a half of floor 
 boards, and tucked away under them, and in the walls, 
 is a mile of electric wire. There are hundreds of iron ties 
 to hold the hollow walls together, and somewhere in the 
 house are a quarter of a million nails. There are seventy 
 bushels of cowhair in the plaster, to keep it firm and 
 strong ; how many of us think that a cow gives anything 
 to a house ? There are three hundred tons of gravel 
 and flints and stones, which the splendid horses drew 
 slowly up the hill ; they brought up also fifty tons of soil, 
 and thousands of pieces of turf, and endless things that 
 somehow had not come into our dream. It is good we 
 should not know the full meaning of our dreams ; perhaps, 
 if we did, we should hardly try to bring them true. 
 
 Yet who would not live with Nature on a hill ? Who 
 would not have a house to which Nature comes unbidden, 
 in which all these immensities of things are used and 
 fashioned so that they seem, not to keep her out, but 
 to bring Nature herself indoors ? We are up 
 
 and up, where Nature's heart 
 Beats strong amid the hills,
 
 A HILLTOP ON THE ISLAND 121 
 
 and our hearts beat with it. The sun pours down on 
 the hill as it poured when Saxons and Jutes and Romans 
 came this way, and in the days when the mammoth roamed 
 the Island. But the sun pours now on other scenes. The 
 hilltop is lonely no more. We look out from the windows 
 and see 
 
 The world that was ere we were born, 
 The world that is when we are gone. 
 
 The red, red roses are blooming, sweet alyssum is looking 
 at her best. The laburnum has gone, the hollyhocks have 
 come, and the larkspur is out in full bloom. Something 
 new has happened on the old, old hill, and in the wood 
 and in the valley the birds and trees and flowers are 
 singing of the time when the new thing shall be old. 
 
 , And we think of it, too, and wonder where all our 
 dreaming will be then. We do not know. We must do 
 our best, and leave the hilltop better for our having passed 
 this way.
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 
 
 I HAVE found where God lives ; He hides in my wood. 
 
 The sun comes peeping through the trees, and life 
 pushes on to the summer. The bluebells are bursting 
 through the earth, and the primroses are out. Life is 
 keeping her promise; God who never broke His word is 
 plainly in my wood. 
 
 But the other day the snow lay on the slopes and in 
 the hollows, and now the earth is opening up her treasure. 
 The trees are tipped with life. Spring is here with her 
 messengers, and soon it will be May, and soon it will be 
 June. Those heavenly days that cannot die will come 
 again with roses. The garden will be filled with beauty 
 and the wood will be filled with song, and we shall lie 
 in this place, looking up through the tree-tops to the sky, 
 and shall feel that God in truth is hiding here. Up 
 through the tree-tops, down in the earth, away across the 
 valley, the chain of life runs unbroken. The face of the 
 earth is changing now white with snow, now yellow 
 with the primrose and the daffodil, now glorious with the 
 bluebell and red with the rose; but the great heart of 
 life beats on eternally. From day to day and year to year, 
 down in the depths of it, up in the heights of it, is God. 
 
 You cannot sit among the bluebells without knowing 
 that; you cannot see the daffodil come to greet you 
 spring by spring and not know that He who made the 
 
 heavens is hiding there. You cannot spend a morning 
 
 122
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 123 
 
 in my wood and not know that it is holy ground. The 
 very trees would cry out if men did not proclaim it. 
 Nature has many tongues for those who understand her, 
 and one speaks through the wood; and in this little bit 
 of English earth, in these trees that clothe the ridge of 
 the great North Downs, the voice we hear is not to be 
 mistaken. It bears the message of Eternal Life. 
 
 Lie down in this ivy bed with me and look out across 
 the hills. This little patch of mine, this place where even 
 a poor man may be king, is witness unto all the world of 
 the great everlasting things. A little patch, but packed 
 with power; not very wide and not very long, but eight 
 thousand miles deep, with page after page on which 
 the hand of God has written the story of the earth. We 
 see the wonder of a thousand things that lie about us, 
 but above us and beneath us lie the future and the past, 
 and we can only dream of these. Through tne spacious 
 heavens roll world on world that men will come to know 
 in other days; under this ivy bank, under the roots of 
 the old gnarled oak, lie the remnants of the ages of the 
 earth. 
 
 Knock softly at the door of the daffodils, and slip down 
 in your fancy through the living world from which they 
 bring their power and glory, down past the longest runner 
 of the deepest root of the trees, and you come to the 
 bed of an ancient sea. You go through what was the 
 surface of the earth in the days when men lived in caves 
 and fought in this place with the lion and the bear. You 
 reach the very footprints of inhabitants of the world in 
 the days when man was rising from barbarism and cloth- 
 ing himself with his mighty powers, and when this little 
 wood of mine lay under ice and snow. Down we go
 
 124 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 until we find the surface of the earth as the mastodon 
 knew it, and we shall find here, perhaps, the quaint little 
 creature with three toes from which all our horses have 
 sprung, lying in a bed where he died about a million 
 years ago, after a life in which he must have fought, 
 here in this peaceful Kent, the tiger and the crocodile. 
 
 The birds are singing as we lie a-thinking, but deeper 
 down lie the graves of the first birds that flew ; and down 
 beyond the birds lie what remains of the gigantic reptiles 
 that were kings of the earth in the days when there were 
 flying dragons but no men. Perhaps we might find their 
 footprints down below, and remnants of old trees that 
 grew ; certainly we should find remains of those enormous 
 trees that grew before the reptiles came, that grew old 
 and fell, and covered enormous areas of the earth, and in 
 the course of time were changed in wondrous ways to 
 coal. We have gone through the chalk down to coal, 
 and through the coal, perhaps ten or twenty million 
 years ago in time, we go and find still older, stranger 
 forms of life, the remnants of the first living things that 
 ever had a backbone running through them, the corals 
 and the trilobites that crammed the ancient seas. And 
 even beyond these we may let our fancy run down under- 
 neath the wood, for farther still there lies whatever may 
 be left of the early days of Life, when the earth was 
 slowly cooling down and shaping into something like the 
 world we know, forming its atmosphere and oceans. 
 
 We have gone a long way down for a man to dig; no 
 man has ever dug so deep, nor ever can ; but there, beneath 
 my daffodils, these wonders lie Life with all its memories, 
 glimpses of the earth in all its great adventures, and 
 down beyond them all, if we could go, the earth is doubt-
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 125 
 
 less as it was when red-hot rains fell on its surface and 
 nothing living could endure. Deep, deep down in my eight 
 thousand miles or does only four thousand miles of it 
 belong to me and four thousand to him who lies on 
 another bank eight thousand miles through the earth, 
 somewhere in New Zealand? deep down is the earth 
 as it was in the beginning, hot as a roaring furnace; 
 and we lie on the outer crust among the bluebells, 
 with the sun looking on as it looked on all these ages 
 that have passed. We greet the sun and know that he 
 has been there all the time; we know that he will still 
 be there when age after age has passed, when men find 
 bits of battleships and motor-cars lying buried in the 
 earth as we find bits of bears and mastodons. So old 
 is the sun, and yet so young in his career; and this very 
 day he summons up the daffodils and touches them with 
 gold. He seems to say to them : 
 
 For some shall bear the may-flowers fair, 
 
 And some the violets blue, 
 But white and gold is what I'll hold, 
 
 And hold unstained for you. 
 
 From the beginning of the world till now the sun has 
 poured down on this place ; from the beginning of life till 
 now the great living chain has continued here; nothing 
 about us can we see that is not packed with power, and 
 most of it lives and grows and is moving onward to its 
 destiny. 
 
 I hear a gun as I lie in the wood, and I know that 
 the rich man with the land next to mine has his game- 
 keeper busy at his killing. I do not want a gamekeeper 
 for my little patch of earth; I want a lifekeeper, some-
 
 126 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 body who will keep watch in my wood for me and take a 
 note of everything that happens here. He should make a 
 map that would show me every tree, and the homes of 
 all the birds, especially the homes of the builders of the 
 wood, those lovely jays whose ancestors, they say, dropped 
 the seeds from which these oak trees sprang, and who 
 drop seeds still, so that little trees spring up, and Nature's 
 great cathedral goes on growing. This map should show 
 me all the rabbit-holes and mole-hills round about it, 
 and there should be a little plan of the doings of the 
 underground architects and their marvellous corridors 
 and chambers. I would have marked in the map some of 
 the chemical laboratories in which the daffodils are made 
 beneath the soil, and all the beds of bluebells and wild 
 violets, and the long lines of forget-me-nots that we 
 would not exchange for any number of pictures in a rich 
 man's house. 
 
 The map would never hold the millions of anemones, 
 but the primrose clusters would be there, and the black- 
 berry bushes, and the wild cherry-trees that throw out 
 their branches until they turn round as if they would 
 go back to the earth again, and then curl up and hang like 
 heavy-laden baskets all about the tree. It would show 
 all the walks and all the sloping banks, and the little 
 places where the sun peeps through, and the gate through 
 which we slip into the strawberry field in June, and the 
 ways the fox comes in at night, and of course the sanctuary 
 beyond the pond, where in summer the nettles and 
 brambles and traveller's joy will be so thick that nobody 
 can disturb the birds. Clearly we must have a map of 
 these things, and of all the nooks and walks and paths 
 I would not change for Bond Street.
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 127 
 
 And then the watcher in the wood would surely take 
 a census for me. He could not count up all its population, 
 for that would be a greater task than counting the United 
 Kingdom; but he would make some reckoning of the 
 tenants of the wood those who work in it and those 
 who play; those who steal about meaning to do no harm 
 at all and those who steal about seeking whom they may 
 devour. More busy lives have I in my wood than there 
 are men and women in all the countries of the earth, but 
 all this host works on unseen, seeking neither reward nor 
 praise, but raising up before my eyes a monument not 
 less enduring, a structure not less noble, than Christopher 
 Wren raised when he built St. Paul's. Down in the dark 
 earth, in partnership with the sun in the heavens, they 
 shape and scent and colour the bluebells and the daffodils ; 
 they weave my ivy carpet, lay it on the floor, and fix it 
 down for me ; they throw green ivy wrappings round the 
 trees, turn old stumps into things of beauty, and hang 
 their curtains on the hedgerows. 
 
 Down in their dark laboratories they make a thousand 
 different things, all blending in the wood as if some 
 conscious mind had planned and thought it out. They 
 will take a heap of rubbish if you will leave it, and one 
 day you will go back again and find it beautiful to look 
 upon, carpeted and massed with colour. They will 
 throw things up from the earth as delicate and dainty 
 as the workings of a watch, or more fragile still; and 
 they will throw up, beside these, mighty pillars as in some 
 great cathedral. They will draw power from above down 
 into their dark chambers, take it out in grains and atoms, 
 and pass it through their wondrous processes and make 
 it into timber; and they will shoot it out into the earth
 
 128 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 to be a mighty oak, or a slender ash, or a far-spreading 
 beech, or a stately elm. Hundreds of tons of these 
 splendid timbers they will build up and throw high in the 
 air. We need not be less grateful for their labours because 
 we do not see them ; and with their constant labour, their 
 wonderful chemistry, their engineering achievements in 
 raising great masses of timber to such great heights, they 
 must clearly have an industrial section of our census for 
 themselves. 
 
 Then we must put our robins down, especially little 
 redbreast, who conies about us whenever we make fires 
 in winter; who will hop on to the barrow, or even on to 
 the spade as we are using it, and who, I know, will hop 
 on to my hand whenever I can find an hour to sit and 
 wait for him. I want to meet the little beetle who lives 
 in the bark, the little mother who brings up her children 
 there and guards the entrance with her body till she dies, 
 protecting her little ones from invasion while they bore 
 their way out. A hundred friends like this we must put 
 down. 
 
 And he must be an artist, too, this Lifekeeper of the 
 wood. He must keep his eye on all the changing scenes, 
 on all the changing shapes and colours ; he must find the 
 best points of view and make a note of them. Very 
 important are the points of view ; they may mean every- 
 thing in the world to us one of these days, and it will help 
 you if you have a wood like mine. How many times have 
 I wanted to cut down a tree, or part of one, but first 
 have walked all round it, and looked at it this way and 
 that, so that the branches that looked like cripples before 
 have suddenly become graceful and lovely. There are 
 more ways than one of looking at most things, and
 
 THE PAGEANTRY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH WHILE SIR WALTER RALEIGH, THE NOBLEST 
 FIGURE OF HER ERA, LANGUISHED IN THE TOWER 
 
 IStt Chapter 5
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 129 
 
 these words of Wordsworth's come to mind again and 
 again : 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 And if you have a wood especially if you love it so 
 that you do not mind putting on old boots and old coats 
 in winter and going through it with a billhook and a 
 rake you will learn to look at things from many points 
 of view and see how one thing balances another; and 
 you will see how things that seem useless or even ugly 
 in themselves may be splendid as part of a whole. You 
 will learn, too, if you would read the lessons of a wood 
 on any winter's day, one of the greatest truths of all 
 that even Nature needs the helping hand of man. 
 
 You may touch a whitethorn which has been growing a 
 year or two under an oak, and it may come away in your 
 hand; the water falling from the oak has sapped away 
 the root, and the young tree has rotted through neglect. 
 So you will find trees with hollows filled with water after 
 every storm, and if you love trees you will empty these 
 hollows of water and seal them up and save the tree. As 
 we murder children in our slums by our neglect, so we 
 murder trees, and it is pitiful to see a great tree die for 
 want of a thing a child can do. The man in the wood 
 will keep a note of all repairs like these, and of all the 
 danger-spots. 
 
 Let us hope he will actually be an artist when we get 
 him, for there are things in woods that should be joys for 
 ever. The shafts of sunlight pouring through the tops, 
 the tips of the maple-buds in the sun, the twinkling light
 
 130 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 on a million leaves, the carpet stretching away with its 
 ever-changing tones, and the swaying and bending of the 
 trees there must be immortal pictures of such things 
 as these* We shall want a kinematograph, perhaps, to 
 catch the trees as they bend and sway. Who has not 
 watched them in the wind, when the topmost branches 
 bend to kiss their neighbours ? Side by side they have 
 grown through many winters and summers; they have 
 climbed up together towards the sky, but although so 
 near they never touch, save when the wind comes rushing 
 through. It is the only time they come together. Through 
 March and April gales they lash like enemies, but in the 
 summer breeze they clasp like friends. 
 
 Have you thought of that idea of Herbert Spencer's, 
 who used to wonder about the swaying of the trees, and 
 who thought of it so long that at last he made up his 
 mind that it had something to do with the rising of the 
 sap? What a mysterious thing is the circulation system 
 of a tree, the stream of life flowing through it, rising from 
 the root to the topmost branch, spreading to the end of 
 the thinnest twig and the tip of the tiniest leaf ! Who 
 pumps it up, and by what power does it rise? From 
 what source does it come, the power of these engines 
 that go on ever working and who shall measure it ? It 
 is one of the things our woodkeeper must meditate about ; 
 he must be very good at thinking mysteries out. 
 
 And the noises in the wood he must surely make a 
 list of these. There is nothing quite like the way of a 
 wood. It seems to be as still as death, but suddenly, 
 as you listen to the stillness, a noise breaks like an engine 
 throbbing; you have startled a pheasant or a partridge 
 by a movement of your hand, and it bursts up through
 
 WHERE GOD LIVES 131 
 
 the trees with tremendous energy. And then there are 
 the noises that strangers do not hear; you must know 
 the wood well to understand its sounds. A hundred 
 times in a wood you will turn round suddenly, expecting 
 to see someone coming, but there is nobody there. It 
 is only the trick of the trees perhaps a springing branch, 
 a falling twig, the rustle of dry leaves, the splitting of 
 dead wood. Often you will hear the very clap of death. 
 Listen to two live branches as they clap, and then to the 
 clapping of two dead ones, and you will feel that you 
 have found out something of the difference between 
 death and life. 
 
 Even walking quietly through a wood will often cause 
 a curious sort of movement in the trees. Try it in the 
 winter, when the trees are heavy and white with snow. 
 Nothing on earth is more lovely than a wood is then, 
 and if you will put on your snowshoes and your Burberry, 
 and walk even lightly through the wood, the trees will 
 often scatter their snowdrops over you, and sometimes 
 they will cover you with snow as if for all the world they 
 have been waiting for your coming. So lightly balanced 
 is everything about a tree that the movement of treading 
 underneath may shake it. But come into a wood after a 
 storm, when everything is still elsewhere, and here it will 
 still be raining; the rain collected on the trees will fall 
 long after it has ceased beyond the wood. And so the 
 wood rains in winter, too, when there is no rain outside; 
 often during a rapid thaw the unfrozen moisture in the 
 trees will fall like showers of rain. 
 
 All these little ways we must have written down in 
 the story of the wood, and I hope we shall not forget 
 the little trick a tree has at times of taking off your cap
 
 132 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 for you if you should forget the sacredness of woods and 
 happen to keep it on. Again and again it will happen 
 in an old wood, where swaying brambles, or a swinging 
 branch of quickset, or a long streamer of wild rose clamber- 
 ing about a tree, will take your cap and toss it into the 
 air. If it be the wild clematis that plays this trick with 
 you, you may have to fight for your cap as this fierce 
 plant fights for its life. It will grip you like a serpent 
 if it gets a chance; it will wind itself about you, and 
 often, however you try to disentangle it from the tree 
 up which it creeps, it will not come down. A hundred 
 times it will break before it will come down. At other 
 times you may pull and pull till you are tired, and still 
 the wild clematis will come and come until what you 
 have pulled, all growing from a single root and all entwined 
 about a single tree, may be as long as a street. 
 
 But there is much to do in Little Treasure Island and 
 we cannot lie for ever dreaming in a wood, feeling, in this 
 stillness, how far the world has wandered from the path 
 laid down for men. We are very near to God in this 
 great silence. We feel that we can almost hear the heart 
 of Nature beating we feel that the secret of life is found 
 in scenes like this, and not in the tumult of battle. 
 
 Very near is silence to the heart of things ; very near 
 to the Power that rules the worlds are the quiet, incalcul- 
 able forces of the wood. A great and blissful thing it is 
 to be alive, but near the very heart of life how solemn ! 
 So deep, so wide, so universal is my little wood that it 
 can hold the glory of the Island and the wonder of the 
 world, and God Himself is here.
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 WE who were born in the Island were born to a noble 
 heritage; we were born to treasures that the wise among 
 us would not sell for the crown of a king. For us is the 
 great inspiration of those who made our land the home 
 of freedom, for us is the treasure laid up where moth and 
 rust have not corrupted it. It is not the king alone 
 who wears a crown ; we have, each one of us, a crown of 
 liberty and very gold that we should cherish as life itself. 
 
 More than ever in the years to come we shall love 
 these precious things that nothing on the earth can take 
 away from us. The Great Peace may find us poorer; 
 we may live in smaller houses, work harder and longer, 
 and the burden of life may be heavy to bear, but we shall 
 have great consolations. Always there will be for us the 
 stainless glory of our land, the memory of the things that 
 it has done for all mankind, and always there will be 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 We are not growing up, we who are his countrymen, 
 with that thought of Shakespeare that all the world 
 outside us has. He stands to the world as its greatest 
 man, a man in whom the human mind reached nearest 
 to its Maker; but to us he is our countryman, the man 
 incomparable who came among us to make us great and 
 lift us up. He stood up in the Island, he walked in 
 England all unguessed at, he gave a glory to the earth 
 that will not pass away, and we dare not be unworthy of 
 our king of men. 
 
 133
 
 134 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 He is not too great or high for every one of us. He 
 lived our life and spoke our thoughts; he left behind a 
 priceless gift for every boy and girl born in his land. 
 We come to him, a great writer has said, as we come to 
 works of Nature, knowing that, like sun and sea and stars, 
 like frost and rain and dew, we are to submit to him 
 in perfect faith that he is right. But we come to him, 
 all the same, not fearfully, as to some mighty being, but 
 with confidence as in a friend. He understands us; we 
 understand him. 
 
 We can hardly think a thought that Shakespeare 
 cannot match; we can hardly imagine a situation that 
 something he said does not fit. His language fits all times 
 and his thought all places; no part of existence, no 
 depth of the universe, no problem of human life, seems 
 to be outside his range. A poet is no rattle-brain, said 
 Emerson he does not merely say what comes to him 
 first, but he speaks from a heart in unison with his time 
 and his country. But the wonder of Shakespeare is that 
 his heart beats in unison with all times and all countries. 
 
 Nothing came amiss to him. A story of a thousand 
 years ago in Shakespeare's hand was fashioned into 
 something that will thrill the world a thousand years 
 from now; he will fit tomorrow morning's paper as he 
 fitted yesterday's. He will move us now to laughter, now 
 to tears. Never in real life has come together such a 
 marvellous crowd of people as Shakespeare's, and there 
 is none among them that he does not seem to know as 
 he knows himself. He makes us feel that we know them, 
 too. He puts us down in this great crowd of people and 
 introduces us, and while we sit and read we win a friend 
 or make a foe.
 
 SHAKESPEARE 135 
 
 It is all very real, and they are all real people. They 
 are not here merely for a story, though you will find no 
 more exciting stories anywhere, for every kind of man you 
 ever meet in stories is in Shakespeare clown and fools 
 and knaves, drunkards and madmen, kings and pedlars, 
 merchants and thieves, cardinals and statesmen, great 
 ladies and country wenches, beautiful children and 
 degraded creatures, fairies, witches, ghosts, and goblins 
 we meet them all in Shakespeare. But, though they move 
 in thrilling stories, they are there not only for the story. 
 So great a master of himself is Shakespeare that he will 
 end his story in the middle and go on a way that would 
 kill most other books but makes no difference at all in 
 his, for these people of his plays are in the ceaseless round 
 of life, reflecting the life and feeling of the world, the 
 beating of the hearts of all mankind, as a diamond reflects 
 light. His next-of-kin in the world of books, our great 
 John Milton, soared up into the heavens for the play of 
 forces that make up the everlasting interest of the world, 
 but Shakespeare found them here on earth. 
 
 His mind is in the heavens he takes a truth and 
 carries it to its greatest height and sets it there for all 
 mankind to see but the life he pictures for us is the life 
 that goes on all about us. His people are such people 
 as we know, and his thoughts are such things as our 
 dreams are made of. We can get into Plato's brain, said 
 Emerson, and think as if we were there, but we cannot 
 get into Shakespeare's. We may say that his mind came 
 nearer being infinite and illimitable than the mind of any 
 other man. How far it reaches out, how marvellous are 
 the images it conjures up, and yet how familiar it all 
 seems, and how much a part of the workaday world !
 
 136 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It is the humanity of Shakespeare, his touch with the 
 world at all the points at which our own lives touch it, 
 that brings him close to us, and keeps his words alive. It 
 is not something far away from us and beyond us. It is 
 your life and mine that lives in Shakespeare, for the 
 hearts of men have been the same since Adam lived in 
 Eden; and Shakespeare goes out seeking men, finds them 
 in their good and evil hours, and penetrates them through 
 and through, as if his pen were some magic thing that 
 could pierce their inner lives, and come out touched with 
 their subtlest motives and their most secret purposes. 
 There are some clocks that tell the time and show the 
 mechanism too, and it seemed to Goethe that Shakespeare's 
 characters were like that. We see the actions of a man, 
 and seem to see the working of his heart and mind. 
 
 And it is this power, piercing down beneath the surface 
 of life, like the Rontgen rays, that Shakespeare will give 
 to you if you will take it. He who listens to Shakespeare 
 enriches his life and strengthens himself for his battles 
 with the world. Shakespeare is no preacher; he sees 
 things as they are, and paints them so. He shows us 
 human causes and their consequence ; he shows how little 
 passions grow to great and lead to tragedy; he shows us 
 how dishonour leads to ruin and evil overwhelms the 
 lives of innocent and sinful, too; he gives us the sure 
 foundation of worthy lives, loving our country and our 
 neighbours, cherishing friends, and bearing ourselves in 
 dignity against an enemy. 
 
 Shakespeare knew well the ways of selfishness, the 
 friends who come and go as fortune comes and goes : 
 
 Every man will be thy friend 
 
 Whilst thou hast wherewith to spend;
 
 SHAKESPEARE 137 
 
 But if store of crowns be scant, 
 No man will supply thy want. 
 
 
 He that is thy friend indeed, 
 He will help thee in thy need; 
 If thou sorrow, he will weep ; 
 If thou wake, he cannot sleep; 
 
 Thus of every grief in heart 
 He with thee doth bear a part. 
 These are certain signs to know 
 Faithful friend from flattering foe. 
 
 " A friend should bear a friend's infirmities," he tells 
 us, and we may every one accept those well-tested words 
 of Hamlet : 
 
 Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, 
 Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. 
 
 A mingled web it is that makes up human life, for none 
 of us is wholly good nor wholly bad : 
 
 The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, 
 
 Good and ill together; our virtues would be proud 
 
 If our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would 
 
 despair 
 If they were not cherished by our virtues. 
 
 And so there are few of us who may read without 
 profiting the worldly wisdom of a father to the son who is 
 leaving home. 
 
 Give thy thoughts no tongue, 
 Nor any unproportioned thought his act. 
 
 Beware 
 
 Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, 
 Bear 't that the opposed may beware of thee. 
 Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
 
 138 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. 
 
 Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 
 
 But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy, 
 
 For the apparel oft proclaims the man. 
 
 Neither a borrower nor a lender be; 
 
 For loan oft loses both itself and friend, 
 
 And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. 
 
 This above all : to thine own self be true, 
 
 And it must follow, as the night the day, 
 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man. 
 
 We must " be patient, for the world is broad and 
 wide," and we must beware, as we go about the world, of 
 false friends everywhere who would deceive us. " All 
 that glisters is not gold," and even Satan can quote 
 Scripture for his purpose : 
 
 An evil soul, producing holy witness, 
 Is like a villain with a smiling cheek; 
 A goodly apple rotten at the heart. 
 O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath ! 
 
 We must beware, too, of evil talkers : "Be thou as 
 chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape 
 calumny." We must guard ourselves also against all 
 those people whom we find wherever we go, the weary 
 talkers of infinite nothings, creeping into our conversations 
 and wasting our time ; such a one as Gratiano, who talked 
 more rubbish than any man in Venice : 
 
 His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two 
 bushels of chaff ; you shall seek all day ere you find them, 
 and when you have them they are not worth the search. 
 
 Modesty and caution become us all; you are to 
 
 Have more than thou showest, 
 Speak less than thou knowest, 
 Lend less than thou owest.
 
 SHAKESPEARE 189 
 
 We are to be ashamed of ignorance, and to love 
 knowledge, for 
 
 Ignorance is the curse of God, 
 Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. 
 
 We are to be kind, remembering that " ill deeds are 
 doubled with an evil word " ; we are to speak gently, 
 remembering that 
 
 Curses never pass 
 The lips of those that breathe them in the air. 
 
 We who know the better are not to follow the worse ; 
 he who sins knowingly is the most offending of all : 
 
 For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, 
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. 
 
 We must do all the good we can : 
 
 How far that little candle throws his beams ! 
 So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 
 
 Especially we must bear with those who may not 
 think as we do. That liberty we claim for ourselves we 
 must willingly give to others. How much of the world's 
 sorrow, how much misery in the lives of men and nations, 
 might have been saved by the wide tolerance of Shake- 
 speare, who thinks no worse of a man who may earnestly 
 hold opposite opinions to his own ! We should learn by 
 heart that moving outburst of passion in Shylock, a lesson 
 for all time to all who bear the name of Christian : 
 
 Hath not a Jew eyes ? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, 
 dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? Fed with the 
 same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the 
 same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and 
 cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ? 
 If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you tickle us, do we
 
 140 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if 
 you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like 
 you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. 
 
 We may be strong in opinions and numbers, but we 
 
 must remember that 
 
 It is excellent 
 
 To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous 
 To use it like a giant. 
 
 Clothed in justice, we can face a world of enemies, for 
 
 Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just, 
 And he but naked, though locked up in steel, 
 Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted. 
 
 And yet in any quarrel, however firmly based in justice 
 we may be, let us remember that highest above all is 
 mercy : 
 
 The quality of mercy is not strained ; 
 
 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
 
 Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest 
 
 It blesseth him that gives and him that takes; 
 
 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes 
 
 The throned monarch better than his crown; 
 
 His sceptre shows the force of temporal power 
 
 The attribute to awe and majesty, 
 
 Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings 
 
 But mercy is above this sceptred sway, 
 
 It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, 
 
 It is an attribute to God himself; 
 
 And earthly power doth then show likest God's 
 
 When mercy seasons justice. 
 
 So the qualities that make up greatness will come into 
 our lives, the elements of nobility will mix in us, so that 
 it may be said of us as Antony said of Brutus : 
 
 His life was gentle, and the elements 
 
 So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 
 
 And say to all the world, " This was a man."
 
 SHAKESPEARE 141 
 
 We must be brave and honourable, that conscience 
 may not hurt us at the end, so that we may be like him 
 of whom " Nothing in his life became him like the leaving 
 it." Honour more than all else we must love : 
 
 Life every man holds dear; but the brave man 
 Holds honour far more precious-dear than life. 
 
 Money, compared with honour, is as nothing : 
 
 He who steals my purse steals trash, 
 But he who niches from me my good name 
 Robs me of that which not enriches him 
 And leaves me poor indeed. 
 
 Nothing that life holds is worth an evil name : 
 
 The purest treasure mortal times afford 
 
 Is spotless reputation; that away, 
 
 Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay . . . 
 
 Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; 
 
 Take honour from me, and my life is done. 
 
 And courage, too, we must have; we must face 
 whatever stormy winds may blow, not sitting down and 
 weeping, for 
 
 Woe doth the heavier sit 
 Where it perceives it is but faintly borne, 
 
 and " when sorrows come, they come not single spies 
 but in battalions." We must be of good cheer, for " a 
 light heart lives long," and 
 
 A merry heart goes all the day, 
 Your sad tires in a mile-a. 
 
 Let us face with a stout heart whatever adversity may 
 befall us : 
 
 A plague on sighing in grief; 
 
 It blows a man out like a bladder,
 
 142 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 and there is no strength in bladders. Rather we must 
 remember that 
 
 A jewel in a ten-times-barred-up chest 
 Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast. 
 
 There is no chance in this world for the coward : 
 
 Cowards die many times before their deaths; 
 The valiant never taste of death but once. 
 
 There is very little chance even for Mr. Timidity, 
 always afraid, dreaming uneasily in the night and waking 
 up every morning with a tremble : 
 
 Our doubts are traitors, 
 And make us lose the good we oft might win 
 By fearing to attempt. 
 
 He will succeed in his great adventure who bears this 
 truth in mind : 
 
 There is a tide in the affairs of men 
 
 Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; 
 
 Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
 
 Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 
 
 But in all our ventures we must remember well that 
 more even than to command success is to deserve it. 
 We must do no ill that good may come; we must suffer 
 no stain to come upon our name to justify an evil con- 
 science afterwards, for " conscience doth make cowards 
 of us all." We must be free from its reproaching voice. 
 
 It's a dangerous thing. It makes a man a coward; 
 a man cannot steal but it accuseth him; he cannot swear 
 but it checks him. 'Tis a blushing, shamefast spirit that 
 mutinies in a man's bosom ; it fills one full of obstacles ; 
 it made me once restore a purse of gold that I found ; it
 
 SHAKESPEARE 143 
 
 beggars any man that keeps it ; it is turned out of all towns 
 and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that 
 means to live well endeavours to trust to himself, and to 
 live without it. 
 
 To all who help us in this world we must be thankful. 
 To God Himself, who gives us all, we must be filled with 
 daily thankfulness : 
 
 Let never day nor night unhallowed pass, 
 But still remember what the Lord hath done. 
 
 We must be grateful to men, not bringing on ourselves 
 the burden of these bitter words : 
 
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind ! 
 Thou art not so unkind 
 As man's ingratitude; 
 
 and for those who have loved us and taught us we must 
 cherish gratitude that words can hardly tell, for 
 
 Sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
 To have a thankless child. 
 
 Pursuing these paths, we shall come to the Kingdom 
 of Peace. We shall learn to love the happiness that lies 
 in simple things : 
 
 'Tis better to be lowly born, 
 And range with humble livers in content, 
 Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, 
 And wear a golden sorrow. 
 
 We shall wear thfe crown of contentment that is within 
 the reach of all : 
 
 My crown is in my heart, not on my head; 
 Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones, 
 Nor to be seen; my crown is called Content; 
 A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.
 
 144 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 We shall not imagine that riches bring with them 
 freedom from care, for " they are as sick that surfeit with 
 too much as they that starve with nothing," and care 
 arises from within, not from without. Not even kings 
 are free from care, for " what have kings that privates 
 have not too, save ceremony ? " 
 
 And what is idle ceremony? It brings a king no 
 peace; you and I, then, will not allow it to consume our 
 time and add to our cares. We shall not spoil our happi- 
 ness for the sake of forms and fashions and conventions, 
 but shall be " kind and natural," as Shakespeare prays 
 for England that all her children may be. 
 
 And where in any tongue can words be found that 
 match our Shakespeare's love of the Island that evermore 
 loves him those ringing words that sound like notes of 
 music to us all : 
 
 This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, 
 
 This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
 
 This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
 
 This fortress built by Nature for herself 
 
 Against infection and the hand of war, 
 
 This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall 
 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
 
 Against the envy of less happier lands, 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 
 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, 
 
 Dear for her reputation through the world. . . . 
 
 Such was his love of the Island; and how wide and 
 deep must have been his love for all its natural scenes 
 we see in every play. Long before Wordsworth he loved 
 " the daffodils that come before the swallow dares." He
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH. RELEASED FROM THE TOWER, PAYS HOMAGE AT THE TOMB OF 
 
 QUEEN ELIZABETH 
 
 IStt Page 73
 
 HERE, DOWN THE GREAT STREET OF LIBERTY THAT WE CALL WHITEHALL. HAVE WALKED 
 THE RULERS AND SHARERS OF THE ISLAND FOR A THOUSAND YEARS 
 
 \Ser Chapter 6
 
 IF WE RUN OUT OF WHITEHALL THROUGH THE HORSE GUARDS, AND MOVE BACKWARDS 
 ACROSS THE SQUARE TOWARDS THE PRIME MINISTER'S GARDEN WALL, A STRIKING 
 THING HAPPENS. AMID THE STRANGE TANGLE OF WIRES THAT KEEP THE ADMIRALTY 
 IN TOUCH WITH OUR SHIPS AT SEA LORD NELSON COMES PEEPING UP 
 
 [See Page 79
 
 ROBERT BLAKE CALLS ON CROMWELL IN THE COUNCIL ROOM IN WHITEHALL 
 
 (See Page 80
 
 SHAKESPEARE 145 
 
 loved to see the sun making " cedar tops and hills seem 
 burnished gold." He sent out Ariel to 
 
 Seek some dewdrop here, 
 And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. 
 
 He loved the bank 
 
 Whereon the wild thyme blows, 
 Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. 
 
 His characters go walking in the woods 
 
 Where often you and I 
 Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie. 
 
 He sees a vision of the greatness of Queen Elizabeth, 
 and makes 
 
 Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn, 
 And hang their heads with sorrow. 
 
 He felt, as most of us have felt sometimes, a reluctance 
 to pluck a rose : 
 
 When I have plucked the rose, 
 
 I cannot give it vital growth again. 
 
 It needs must wither. 
 
 I will smell it on the tree. 
 
 He was glad enough to see it grow. To share in the 
 glory of Nature was enough for him. He had no vain 
 covetings; he did not crave such wastefulness and 
 ridiculous excess as 
 
 To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, 
 To throw a perfume on the violet, 
 To smoothe the ice, or add another hue 
 Unto the rainbow. 
 
 We love to think of that scene on the eve of Agincourt, 
 
 L
 
 146 
 
 when the king, appearing disguised before his soldiers, dis- 
 cusses himself with them, and points out that a king, 
 after all, is but a man. There is no better way for Shake- 
 speare to show the Great Equality than to say that Nature 
 is the same for king and subject too : " For, though I 
 speak it to you, I think the king is but a man as I am : 
 the violet smells to him as it doth to me." 
 
 What strength and comfort lie in simple natural 
 things we see above all else in the tragedy of King Lear. 
 We may pity the man or woman who is alive today and 
 has not read " King Lear," and those who are now growing 
 up and will come to read it we may envy. It is perhaps 
 the mightiest thing that a man has ever written, this 
 story of an old man and his children faithful Cordelia, 
 who loved him truly, but would not flatter him, so that he 
 cast her out; and the unnatural daughters who flattered 
 his kingdom out of him and turned him from their doors. 
 Cordelia will not protest she loves him more than all the 
 world; she loves him as a daughter, and that is all. 
 Then the old man, consumed with flattery, casts his child 
 adrift. He will suffer no appeal for her : 
 
 Come not between the dragon and his wrath. 
 I loved her most, and thought to set my rest 
 On her kind nursery. 
 
 Then follow such events in human lives as cannot 
 be described except in Shakespeare, but when all the 
 bitterness has had its way, and all the lives are sacrificed, 
 and all the pain has been endured, and all the guilt is 
 known, it is Lear and Cordelia who are happy for an 
 hour again. It is Lear who feels so happy in that hour 
 that Time, he says, shall devour the eyes of his enemies
 
 SHAKESPEARE 147 
 
 " ere they shall make us weep." They are going off to 
 prison Lear, once King of Britain, and Cordelia, now 
 Queen of France; but prison cannot bind their hearts, 
 and it is the thought of simple things that drives away 
 its terrors. 
 
 Come, let's away to prison; 
 We two will sing like birds i' the cage : 
 When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, 
 And ask of thee forgiveness : so we'll live, 
 And pray and sing and tell old tales, and laugh 
 At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 
 Talk of Court news ; and we'll talk with them, too. 
 Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out, 
 And take upon 's the mystery of things, 
 As if we were God's spies ; and we'll wear out, 
 In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones, 
 That ebb and flow by the moon. 
 
 Yet Shakespeare, if he loved the simple life, felt the 
 great sense of mystery that runs through all things. 
 "We are such siuff as dreams are made on," he said; 
 and " there are more things in heaven and earth than are 
 dreamed of in philosophy." He loved the splendour of 
 the heavens, " this brave o'er-hanging firmament, this 
 majestical roof fretted with golden fire." He felt a sense 
 of purpose in familiar things the quiet life, 
 
 Exempt from public haunts, 
 
 Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 
 
 Who can forget the lovely moonlight night when two 
 friends are sitting in the garden : 
 
 Sit, Jessica : look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold : 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
 
 148 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 
 
 He seemed to hear the music of the spheres ; he felt 
 that there was something in a man unseen and yet all- 
 powerful. He knew that man is much more than we see, 
 and he wrote with this thought in his mind : 
 
 The man that hath no music in himself, 
 Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
 Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; 
 The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
 And his affections dark as Erebus : 
 Let no such man be trusted. 
 
 He would have us think of Nature as of some holy 
 thing. He gives us this solemn picture of the forces of 
 the universe paying their tribute to the birth of Christ : 
 
 Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes 
 Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, 
 The bird of dawning singeth all night long; 
 And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; 
 The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, 
 No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, 
 So hallowed and so gracious is the time. 
 
 And he believed, surely, that Nature is eternally on the 
 side of right. We feel that all the time ; and he has given 
 us this picture of the mutiny of our inner selves when we 
 do wrong : 
 
 Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion all the interim is 
 Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
 
 SHAKESPEARE 149 
 
 The genius and the mortal instruments 
 Are then in council, and the state of man, 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection. 
 
 He felt that there is something after and beyond our 
 life on earth; but of this great mystery of all human 
 time Shakespeare knew no more than we. He puts on 
 Cleopatra's lips these beautiful last words : 
 
 Finish, good lady; the bright day is done; 
 And we are for the dark, 
 
 but he knew that, though death is common, " all that 
 lives must die, passing through nature to eternity," and 
 he declared his faith in God in these everlasting lines : 
 
 There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough hew them how we will. 
 
 Seek what we will that matters to us all, we find it 
 in the book thai Shakespeare left us. It will never fail 
 us if we read it earnestly. It will tell us a good story, 
 it will thrill us with a sense of great adventure, it will 
 keep us company in sorrow and delight us in our happier 
 days, it will lift for us the veil behind which move the 
 inner lives and purposes of men. It encompasses for us 
 the height and depth and breadth of human life. It 
 gives us Ariel's brightness, Rosalind's charm, and the 
 friendship of Celia. It gives us the loyalty of Antony, 
 the jealousy of Othello, and Macbeth's duplicity. It 
 gives us the generosity of Antonio, the ambition of Wolsey, 
 the profundity of Hamlet, the patriotism of Henry the 
 Fifth, the sacrifice of Kent, and the foul treachery of 
 Edmund. It gives us the purity of Isabella, the un- 
 naturalness of Goneril and Regan, the cleverness of
 
 150 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Portia, the devotion of Jessica, and the faithfulness of 
 Cordelia. It gives us the malice of lago, the self-will and 
 vanity of King Lear, the pompous ignorance of Pistol, 
 and Shylock's revengefulness. 
 
 We come to Shakespeare for all these, for infinitely 
 more than these, and he does not fail us. He is the voice 
 of England that will never die. When kings and thrones 
 have perished from the earth, he will sit enthroned in the 
 hearts of men ; and the treasure he gave us, the precious 
 stone he set in the midst of the Island to endure for ever, 
 is yours and mine.
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 
 
 COME for a walk with me through those fair palaces 
 that glitter with the treasure of our Island. For mile 
 after mile we will walk through the wonder and riches 
 of the past. We shall be able to go for a walk through 
 history very near to Cromwell and Drake and Mary 
 Queen of Scots. We shall be able to go for a walk through 
 the days before our history began, when Englishmen 
 lived in caves and fought the bear. 
 
 Far out into .the world we may go, travelling to distant 
 times and far-off places, lost in thought amid the strange 
 life of Stone Age men or cannibal men, or men who built 
 great palaces ten thousand years ago. We can walk to 
 the depths of barbarism or to the heights of civilisation. 
 We can sit and see the things that Socrates and Plato 
 saw; we can touch a thing St. Paul looked on. We can 
 read the actual letter written by Anne Boleyn as her 
 heart was beating high with the thought of marrying 
 the Bluebeard king who murdered her. All this we can 
 do, and more, for the doors of our museums are open 
 wide. 
 
 They have not sold our treasures to pay our taxes, 
 but Governments know and care so little for museums 
 that it is true they shut the doors of these great treasure- 
 houses on millions of soldiers tramping our streets and 
 anxious to see our sights. It was a shame, for there is 
 nothing to compare with our museums. Even Parliament 
 in all its glory is not arrayed like one of these. 
 
 151
 
 152 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 For our museums are like a living book, open at every 
 page with pictures counted in millions, and every one a 
 great original. If you would see what the first bird was 
 like, here is the very bird. If you would see a man who 
 walked the streets when Moses walked, here he is, huddled 
 up in his coffin as he has lain through all the centuries. 
 If you would see the glittering crown of Queen Elizabeth, 
 or the yellow parchment of Magna Carta that King John 
 signed as he chewed bits of wood and straw, here they 
 are. If you would see the Seven Wonders of the World, 
 here is what is left of most of them. If you would sit 
 and look at Caesar face to face, here he is, carved as in 
 very life by men who saw him pass. You can see the 
 glory of the Parthenon as Socrates looked on it on the 
 day he died. You can read Cromwell's letters thanking 
 God, or Wolsey's appeal for pity and compassion in his 
 fall. It would almost be true to say that in these museums 
 there is something of everything, and it would certainly 
 be true to say that in no other corners of the earth can 
 be found concentrated so much that interests the people 
 of the English-speaking race as in one or two museums 
 not far from Charing Cross. 
 
 We cannot hope to do more here than take a rapid 
 glance at them. We shall be like the American traveller, 
 of whom they say that he takes a train and puts his head 
 out at the station, buys a local paper, and so goes on and 
 on till he boasts that there is not a city in the world he 
 does not know. 
 
 The truth is that the wealth of our museums is so 
 immense that no man knows it. No gold can buy it. 
 Treasure piled on treasure meets our gaze; wonder on 
 wonder, tragedy on tragedy, all the emotions that come
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 153 
 
 into life from the cradle to the grave stir in us as we walk 
 through these great galleries. Gems that glitter like the 
 sun, things so beautiful that they seem to belong to a 
 world of dreams ; marvellous products of the patience of 
 Nature and the immense labour of men's hands ; ghastly 
 sights from which we turn away and shudder; memories 
 of immortal deeds ; the touch of Shakespeare and Michael 
 Angelo; a little thing King Alfred owned, something 
 Cromwell wrote, and an actual part of the body of Napoleon ; 
 fragments of history from every age and every land ; types 
 of life from every clime; Nature in all her seasons and 
 in all her glory and through all her generations; the 
 books that men have written, the pictures they have 
 painted, the statues they have carved, objects of a hundred 
 kinds that they have wrought it is all here waiting for 
 us through the gates the Government banged, barred, 
 and bolted during the War. 
 
 You think a museum a dead sort of place perhaps; 
 you may not care for walking about for miles among 
 glass cases. But a museum is a wide, wide world, and 
 is not meant for travellers who rush from end to end. 
 If you could take an aeroplane and fly through England 
 in a day, so that all the glory of its hills and dales, and 
 all the wonder of its domes and towers, and all the summer 
 loveliness of its woods and fields and gardens were specks 
 and patches making no appeal to you, that would be like 
 walking hurriedly through a great museum. But if you 
 went to Winchester and walked down the cathedral 
 nave, or to Westminster Abbey and stood by the tomb 
 of Henry of Agincourt, or to the Tower of London to 
 feel the silence of the Norman chapel there that would 
 be like seeing a museum as museums are meant to be seen.
 
 154 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 The treasures of these places have not come here like 
 rain from heaven, pouring in in myriads, and they are 
 not meant to be seen as in a crowd. They lie in their 
 millions actually and literally million by million but 
 there they lie one by one, and every one is a rare thing 
 to behold. A place alive, not dead, is a museum, alive 
 with a spirit of great adventure, alive with the glow of 
 inspiration and the thrill of all the wonder of this world. 
 If all else must go, let us leave our museums, for they 
 are more packed with the wonder of the life and work 
 of man than any other acres on earth. 
 
 We can never see one half of them; we can never 
 know a tithe of all the treasure that is here. How came 
 it all here? Who found these things, and brought them, 
 and arranged them? That would be the greatest story 
 ever told of patience and courage and genius, of unselfish 
 toil and heroic self-sacrifice, of the hazard of life for the 
 sake of knowledge, and the love of truth above all. A 
 thrilling story it would be, that would take us into the 
 jungle and down into the sea, high up in mountain peaks 
 and underneath the desert sands, into river-beds and 
 glaciers and deep down in the earth, into palaces and 
 temples and mud huts, among savages and wild beasts, 
 and high up on the narrow ledges of a precipice. 
 
 Behind these things that lie in our museums are such 
 great tales as that of Du Chaillu, who travelled on foot 
 or in canoes through 8000 miles of Africa without a white 
 companion. He spent years in places untrodden by any 
 other European. He brought home thousands of speci- 
 mens of animals and birds, sixty of them utterly unknown. 
 He discovered the gorilla in West African forests, and told 
 its story to a world that ridiculed and disbelieved him,
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 155 
 
 His expeditions were shipwrecked again and again, and 
 his collections lost; and he lost everything he had 
 notebooks, photographs, instruments and all one day 
 in the jungle, when a rifle exploded and killed a native, 
 and he had to run for his life. But here in our museums 
 are precious things that he brought home. 
 
 You will see from the cards in some of the South 
 Kensington cases that the contents are from the collection 
 of Allan Hume. He was one of the best friends a museum 
 ever had. He was in India at the time of the Mutiny, 
 and was remembered for his heroism there, but most of 
 all for his love of collecting. He gave up years of his 
 life to add to our knowledge of bird-life in British Asia. 
 He had a devoted band of local observers and collectors, 
 he fitted out expeditions to various places, and he got 
 together the most complete collection of birds and eggs 
 of India that has ever been known. There are in it 
 altogether over 80,000 specimens. The whole of this 
 magnificent collection, with nearly 400 mammals as well, 
 Allan Hume gave to the nation, and the British Museum 
 sent out a man to Simla to pack the treasures for their 
 journey home. He was away for four months, he packed 
 the collection in eighty-two cases, and got them safely 
 home at a cost of nearly a thousand pounds. 
 
 No man can know the long years of devotion and cease- 
 less labour and thinking, the deep love of Nature and the 
 passion for knowledge, that South Kensington enshrines. 
 We have only to think of such a life as that of Hugh Cum- 
 ing, who for a whole generation was unweary in well-doing. 
 He travelled year after year along the Pacific coast and in 
 the Philippine Islands, all the time collecting shells. He 
 gave his whole life to it, and in the end his collection] was
 
 156 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 imcomparably the richest in the world. No man had 
 ever before picked up so many shells, named them, and 
 arranged them so neatly. If Nature had wanted to see 
 her handiwork spread out before her she could not have 
 found a better hand than his to do it. The Cuming 
 collection is famous for its beauty and the amazing 
 variety of its types ; and when it was known, and bought 
 for the nation for 6000, no naturalist anywhere could 
 write a book on shells without referring to it. 
 
 So many a brilliant man has worn his life away in 
 collecting treasures for our museums, or in making cata- 
 logues and writing interesting descriptions of this multi- 
 tude of wonders. You see a few words written on a tablet 
 lying among the shells; you read the notes in these 
 amazing catalogues; but these things that leave us 
 perhaps unmoved represent stupendous labour and often 
 unthinkable devotion. 
 
 Do you remember how John Richard Green lay for 
 years on his death-bed, dictating that History of England 
 which no man has ever matched ? There are stories like 
 these in our museums such stories as that of Dr. Grey, 
 who was Keeper of the British Museum when the last 
 great war was fought in Europe, who gave the museum 
 half a century of his life, and as he lay dying, hardly able 
 to breathe, dictated instructions for the description of 
 a new species on which he was engaged. 
 
 There was a surgeon in the Navy who spent years of 
 his life preparing catalogues for the British Museum 
 until the work broke down his health; there was a naval 
 commander who brought insects from the South Sea 
 Islands, one of the best collectors the museum ever had, 
 until he was killed by a native's poisoned arrow; there
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 157 
 
 was Dr. Sclater, the scientific man who wrote 1300 
 separate papers, largely about things he contributed to 
 the British Museum. 
 
 The tremendous work a museum involves can hardly 
 be understood by those who just pass through. There 
 is a set of small drawers to which Francis Pascoe gave up 
 his life for forty years. You would hardly believe it, 
 but there are 49,000 beetles in them. Pascoe was one 
 of the most remarkable collectors who ever lived. He 
 kept no duplicates and always kept the smallest type of 
 beetle, and he used the shortest pins and the smallest 
 labels he could find. There is another collection made by 
 James Stephens, with 90,000 British insects; there is 
 the Bowring Collection of 230,000 beetles. 
 
 What a sight it would be, the annual procession to the 
 British Museum ! It would be the strangest scene in all 
 the world. It is probably true that there has never been 
 a week for half a century when at least a thousand new 
 creatures have not arrived for the honour of a place in 
 our great treasure-house. They come from every corner 
 of the earth. There were 275,000 centipedes and milli- 
 pedes that came one year from Guatemala. There was a 
 flock of 50,000 birds that came from the Arctic and the 
 Tropics. There were 10,000 beetles from the Nicobar 
 and Andaman Islands. One year there came an invisible 
 host fifty thousand strong, fifty thousand foraminifera, 
 unseen by the naked eye, but every one a joy for ever 
 under the microscope. And one year, in this marvellous 
 procession to the glass cases, came that wondrous flock 
 of humming-birds which John Gould collected. He lived 
 to be a fine old man. He was born in the year before 
 Trafalgar, he worked as a boy in the gardens of Windsor
 
 158 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Castle, and he became a great natural explorer and 
 collector. He got together more than 5000 of these glorious 
 humming-birds, which he showed in the Great Exhibition 
 for which the Crystal Palace was built in 1851. He 
 went on an expedition to Australia with his wife, and the 
 sort of work he did was done at such great peril that 
 three of his collectors lost their lives in it. Before he 
 died he produced over forty volumes, with three thousand 
 plates of birds, which nobody would publish, so that this 
 indomitable man published them himself and made a 
 fortune. It was a great year for the British Museum when 
 the humming-birds arrived. They were bought for 3000, 
 or about half a guinea each, but they doubled the 
 number of visitors to the museum that year, and their 
 little room is one of the j oiliest in South Kensington 
 today. 
 
 Were ever such visitors seen elsewhere as arrive at 
 these museums of ours ? There came in one year 104 
 skulls from Egypt, centuries old. In another year arrived 
 192 skulls of cats that may have prowled about in Pharaoh's 
 palaces. A whale that was stranded at Weymouth was 
 brought to the door one day, and once there arrived in 
 little boxes 958 insects imprisoned in amber, brought 
 from the amber quarries of East Prussia. Two men 
 sent 20,000 Central American birds, and no collection 
 received by the British Museum was ever more fully 
 catalogued. 
 
 You would not like to have to make these catalogues. 
 The catalogue of birds at South Kensington, expected to 
 take ten years, took twenty, and kept ten men busy 
 and grew to twenty-seven volumes. A catalogue of tiny 
 sea creatures took twenty years to make. One collection
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 159 
 
 of birds' eggs numbers nearly 47,000, arranged in 990 
 drawers, and any egg can be found without waiting. In 
 Waterloo year the British Museum had its insects in two 
 cases ; today there are cases everywhere, and 9000 drawers 
 full besides. There are 50,000 bound volumes of manu- 
 script, 75,000 charters and rolls. We see how precious 
 the catalogues and indexes must be when we come to 
 those cabinets with a thousand bottles and drawers full 
 of plants and fruits and seeds brought by Sir Joseph 
 Banks when he went round the world with Captain 
 Cook. There are over 20,000 sorts of plants, and hundreds 
 of flowers preserved in spirits, and the index, making it 
 possible for us to turn up any one of them, enables us 
 to identify thousands of plants that come from distant 
 places. There are thousands of plants that came a 
 hundred years ago from the coast of Van Diemen's Land ; 
 and there is a single collection, built up by Robert James 
 Shuttle worth, containing 170,000 separate plants. 
 
 And come to the animals. A quarter of a century 
 ago there were over two million animals at South Kensing- 
 ton nearly half a million little shell creatures, 300,000 
 birds and 100,000 eggs, 70,000 fishes, 50,000 reptiles. 
 Twenty years ago there were over half a million specimens 
 of geology and 100,000 minerals, and the increasing 
 accumulations of these national collections are incredible 
 almost beyond belief. 
 
 We need not wonder that the British Museum became 
 crammed, so that its acres at Bloomsbury could not 
 accept new creatures, and could not show those it had. 
 It had 12,000 fishes, and exhibited 750; the rest were 
 hidden in the cellars. When Livingstone sent home 
 the things he collected they were put in cellars because
 
 160 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 there was no other room. At last more room was found, 
 and the magnificent galleries of South Kensington were 
 built. They were ready in 1882, and never, surely, was 
 such a flitting as the removal from Bloomsbury. 
 
 All the natural history objects were taken in their 
 millions through the streets of London. It took 97 
 days and 854 journeys to change their address. Over 
 5000 boxes and trays were specially made, and over 
 50,000 objects preserved in spirit had to be moved. More 
 than 1300 things were taken away singly, and to get away 
 the skulls of two whales a brick wall had to be taken 
 down. They were among the oldest things in the museum, 
 and had not seen daylight since the famous Cuvier sketched 
 them for one of his books two generations before. 
 
 It was this rehousing of the natural treasures of the 
 nation that first revealed their untold value to millions 
 of people. This matchless pageantry of the marvels of 
 Nature, mobilised for mile upon mile under one vast roof, 
 is perhaps the supreme educational asset of the whole 
 United Kingdom. South Kensington is a great Museum, 
 but it is equally a great centre of natural research a 
 sort of natural university where, all unseen by the public, 
 men of science are for ever at work, discovering, testing, 
 identifying, comparing, investigating theories of vast 
 importance to us all. Every part of the British Common- 
 wealth has its insect pests, and here men come to study 
 them. An insect was found to be eating the British Army's 
 biscuits, stored away in enormous quantities, and even 
 before the war began South Kensington had saved the 
 country on these biscuits 10,000 a year. What use is a 
 museum? some people ask. Let us look at only one or 
 two of the uses of South Kensington.
 
 NOBLY IN WHITEHALL STANDS THE BOARD OF EDUCATION, WHICH HAS IN ITS 
 KEEPING THE MINDS OF MILLIONS OF LITTLE MEN AND WOMEN WHO WILL RULE 
 THE ISLAND IN THE GOOD TIME COMING 
 
 ISte Page 89
 
 THE GLORY OF OUR GREAT CATHEDRALS SUNLIGHT FALLING THROUGH THE WINDOWS 
 
 OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY 
 
 Reproduced by permission of the Autotype Fine Art Company 
 
 (See Page 92
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 161 
 
 It has saved the sugar plantations of Mauritius from 
 destruction. 
 
 It has been of precious service in dealing with insects 
 attacking envelopes of airships. 
 
 It protects telegraphs and telephones in the tropics 
 against pests. 
 
 It has saved enormous sums of money by checking the 
 warble pest on cattle and the weevil pest on wheat. 
 
 It has dealt with plagues of mosquitoes in the trenches 
 and cockroaches in hospitals. 
 
 It advises fishing companies developing new regions; 
 it looks into the question of preserved foods. 
 
 It has destroyed a pest infesting the waters of Egypt 
 and producing irritating disease. 
 
 It is studying a slug that devastates rubber plantations, 
 a snail that damages Egyptian crops, and shell creatures 
 that carry disease or damage growth in many lands. 
 
 It has advised on mites that damage stores of corn, 
 mites that give disease to horses, and a little nuisance 
 afflicting camels round the Mediterranean. 
 
 It helped the army with its water supply in Cyprus, 
 and was able to guide our engineers searching for potash 
 salts. 
 
 Its fossils were of great value when our army went to 
 Italy and needed information of the country our troops 
 were marching through. 
 
 It tested the wood used in a Zeppelin propeller brought 
 down in this country, and found timbers to match it. 
 
 They are not small things ; they are services of incal- 
 culable value to the nation and mankind. They would 
 be impossible unless these huge collections were spread 
 out where all can see them. If you would identify a 
 plant from Java, or a flower from Persia, or a fruit from 
 Zululand, or a piece of wood from Brazil, here is the
 
 162 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 place to do it. If you have a special bit of moss you 
 cannot recognise, here is one collection with 50,000 mosses 
 in it. If you are puzzled by a fungus, one collection 
 here has 40,000 of them, and you can see them for yourself. 
 
 We have been in only one or two corners of only one 
 or two museums, and as much remains as would remain 
 of London's shops if we had merely walked up Regent 
 Street. Side by side in the museum-land of London 
 stand the great palaces of South Kensington, unrivalled 
 in the wonder of Nature and the achievements of men. 
 In one we walk past Nature's children, standing mile 
 upon mile as they were in life some millions of years 
 ago before the first man walked the earth, some from the 
 North Pole or from the South, some from the lands of the 
 tropical sun, some from the depths of the sea. We walk 
 about among millions of members of Nature's mighty 
 family, some invisible to human eyes, some so huge that 
 special halls were built to house them. In another of 
 these great palaces are gathered a host of the most beautiful 
 things made by the hands of man. Objects great and 
 small, carved in wood, wrought in metal, or woven in 
 fabric; housefronts and stairways, columns, doors, and 
 windows, ceilings, floors, and walls, statues, cameos, 
 gems, enamels, and wondrous vases, carpets and 
 tapestries, precious things in bronze and stone can any 
 treasure our nation holds compare with these ? 
 
 And these are only two of our museums. If you 
 want to see engines and ships and aeroplanes and pumps 
 and turbines, and a thousand other things mechanical, 
 you go next door. If you want to see a footprint on 
 the sands made by some creature long ago extinct, or the 
 mark of a raindrop that fell in a storm when there was
 
 THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND 163 
 
 no man on earth to see it, you go to the Geological Museum 
 in Jermyn Street. If you would stand and see the ruins 
 of the Seven Wonders of the World in ancient times you 
 go to Bloomsbury. If you would touch the very coffin 
 by which stood Rameses the Great, taking leave of his 
 father before they laid him with the long line of Pharaohs, 
 you go to the rare old house of Sir John Soane in Lincoln's 
 Inn Fields. If you would see the car which carried 
 Wellington on his last ride you go down in the crypt 
 of St. Paul's. 
 
 Boundless is the interest of the museum world, and 
 limitless its range. When will our people find it? When 
 will it dawn upon their minds that here are the great 
 theatres of the past, the sun-capped towers and glittering 
 palaces of our Island, crammed with untold treasure that 
 belongs to you and me ?
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 
 
 GOD made the country and man the town, they say. 
 Then let us ride from God's country to man's town. 
 
 God certainly made our Island. Who but the 
 Fashioner and Creator of the heavens could have planned 
 my great hilltop, this natural platform looking down the 
 hills of time ? Who but the Architect and Creator of the 
 earth could have shaped these heights that throw their 
 heads into the sky, and carved these depths that creep 
 down to meet the river? Who but the Begetter of the 
 boundless oceans could have set this river in its place, 
 running through these changing scenes on its way to the 
 changeless sea ? Who but the Author and Giver of life 
 could have made this glory live ? For every bit of this 
 massive world of mine, reaching out and climbing up and 
 diving down for miles about me, is stirring and beating 
 with life, living and growing and moving, touched with 
 the glow that makes it shine this morning as if it were the 
 very gate of heaven. 
 
 But we must leave the gate of heaven and come down 
 into the world. We shall see the sort of place man is 
 making of God's country. It is nine o'clock in the morning, 
 and London lies an hour away. Down we go from the 
 hilltop that was once an ocean-bed, down the slopes where 
 the little river used to run, through the furze and broom 
 and monkey-trees and roses, into the wood where night- 
 ingales have built their homes and sung their songs and 
 
 164
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 165 
 
 brought up their young for fifty years, and out into the 
 narrow lane with not a soul in sight, but with a buzzing 
 of bees and a singing of birds and a swinging of trees and 
 a flapping of butterflies' wings that make up the bustling 
 and the hustling of Nature's city streets. 
 
 For there are very few quiet lanes, if you think of it. 
 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear the things that 
 Nature has to say. 
 
 Down by the bend of the narrow lane, through the arch 
 made by the overhanging elms, we catch sight of the old 
 church tower, a picture of the handiwork of man in a 
 frame not made with hands; but we do not follow the 
 lane who follows a lane when he can jump a stile and 
 walk through a field of gold ? Give me a little path across 
 this field and take your great highways. In summer it is 
 my throne of gold ; in winter it is my field of diamonds. 
 See it with the sun on a million ears of wheat, swinging on 
 their stalks and waving their heads in triumph that they 
 have come in time to save us once again grains of corn 
 more precious than gold. See it with the silver sun on a 
 million crystals of pure snow, diamonds for the asking, as 
 precious and beautiful and far more worth the money 
 than all the diamonds in a Bond Street window. True, 
 I see them only for a moment, but I see them in myriads, 
 ten thousand times ten thousand, and the great lady sees 
 her diamonds only now and then, and sees them then in 
 only ones and twos. 
 
 And so I love this walk from stile to stile, cutting off 
 the corner and leading me to the little houses the little 
 house that was not there the other day, standing now amid 
 the flowers and creeping banks, and the little old house 
 that was there when Shakespeare walked to London. It
 
 166 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 has stood through all these changing years of time. It 
 has seen the passing of the toll-gate and the coming of 
 the train. From the little window that looks up the lane 
 you could have seen the squire and his daughter riding 
 on their horses in those days when squires and their 
 daughters were more important than now, and they must 
 stop and pay their toll before the gate was opened, so that 
 to this day we call this Sparepenny Lane. But from the 
 window at the back you see a stately viaduct, with its 
 tall and beautiful arches rising from the river-banks to 
 bear the train across the Darent Valley. 
 
 Over the hills in the old days a man came tramping day 
 by day. He would pass this little cottage and nod good- 
 morning to a mother with her baby at the gate; and he 
 would go on to where these great pillars were then rising, 
 and hard work he must have found it piling up these bricks 
 so high. They say that, when they came to the pillar 
 which stands close to the river, men worked without 
 ceasing for four days and four nights to get the foundations 
 in; but at last they were in, and as the years went by, 
 and the viaduct was done, and the little baby at the 
 cottage gate grew up, the man who helped to build the 
 viaduct came tramping over the hills again, and again he 
 met the maiden at the gate, and in time he married her. 
 He went to sea on many a British ship; he stood at bay 
 with pirates outside Chinese harbours; but he came back 
 to this cottage to grow old, and he died in sight of his 
 handiwork. He must have been proud that not a brick 
 he laid has ever come away. 
 
 At the cottage gate, as we turn the corner, is the great 
 box so neatly trimmed, a thing of beauty and a joy to all 
 who see it, but a monument to one who never saw it, for
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 167 
 
 she was blind. She loved this box as if it were a child; 
 she shaped it and trimmed it, and ever since she died it 
 has been shaped and trimmed as its blind planter left it. 
 
 It is not a bad text for the beginning of a day. We 
 are never much astray if we go through the world thinking 
 of those who made life beautiful for us. They made our 
 roads, and bridged our rivers, and planted our country 
 lanes ; they did their work and sought no glory for them- 
 selves. Who built this bridge that we are coming to? 
 We do not know. We know it has borne the burden of 
 the day for a hundred years and more ; but the world has 
 never heard of the men who put it there. Who built this 
 Tudor cottage by the bridge ? We know that people turn 
 to look at it on every summer's day, that artists come to 
 sit by the river and paint it; that the rare lady at the 
 window would not change it for a house and grounds in 
 London Town; but who first thought it out and put it 
 there, fitting the village perfectly, no man can say. Over 
 the bridge to the church and who threw up that tower 
 with the ivy creeping over it, with its slender old grey 
 steeple that seems to balance on the wind, and with its 
 clock that speaks to every one who passes by, not only 
 of Time itself, but of the message of Time ? For this 
 clock says to us, in that fine faith of Robert Browning : 
 
 Grow old along with me, 
 The best is yet to be ; 
 
 another good text to carry through the day. Who comes 
 to town from the country brings with him many good 
 things the trees putting on their beauty, the fields waving 
 in the wind, the songs in the hedgerows, and the great 
 heart of Nature beating everywhere.
 
 168 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 But what is it comes to us next? It is the lesson 
 Nature teaches all her children that if we will but follow 
 her she will give us power. We come to a village station. 
 A simple thing a railway ride seems now, but how many 
 lives of human toil have gone to make it possible ? What 
 gigantic labour levelled this great way, moving hundreds 
 of thousands of tons of chalk here and putting it there, 
 piling up masses of brick and stone to carry us high above 
 the tops of houses, and boring tunnels through the rock ? 
 This line that runs through a hole in the earth and bears 
 us on its back must feel at home down there, for it lay in 
 the earth for ages before man hacked it out and turned 
 it into steel in his great furnaces. Look at it shining like 
 silver, and think of the men who have handled it, the 
 fierce fires that melted down the ore and poured it, purified, 
 into the crucible, the great hammers that beat it, the 
 moulds that fashioned it into shape. 
 
 All through the world you will find these shining rails. 
 They take men everywhere. And how easily these engines 
 glide along them ! A long way the world has moved since 
 Richard Trevithick, poor Captain Dick, used to walk along 
 the banks of our little river close to here, thinking out the 
 way to make a drop of water carry men about the world. 
 He died so poor that the hand of charity laid him to rest 
 not far from the river that flows beneath our viaduct, but 
 he left the world richer for his life, and every time we go 
 by train we should be thankful for poor Captain Dick. 
 He laid the way for George Stephenson, who laid the way 
 for all those men who laid the way for us. So, like the 
 steel line that runs through Kent to London, there runs 
 through life the chain of service, link bound to link, all 
 for each and each for all, and nobody knows where the
 
 THE COUNTRY IS AFIRE WITH RED AND GOLD, AND ALL OUR LITTLE WORLD IS LIKE 
 
 A WINDOW INTO PARADISE 
 
 [See Chapter 13
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 169 
 
 chain began and nobody knows where it will end. The 
 loom of Time goes spinning on, yesterday, today, tomorrow, 
 and for ever. 
 
 And our train goes on. Out of the tunnel it comes, into 
 the sunny fields again. The beauty of the world is passing 
 for a moment, for we are nearing Swanley, which has lost 
 its ancient charm and turned its gardens into slums. 
 Many years of bad government have ruined the loveliness 
 of this place, yet there are things to see and beautiful 
 things to think of, for we are passing the place where the 
 first geranium burst into bloom, in a nursery where 
 passers-by would often see a good old man whose name 
 was known throughout the world. For fifty years or more 
 he toiled among his flowers, loving them as he loved his 
 children, improving old ones and making new ones, and 
 sending his seeds and plants and shrubs and trees to 
 gardens everywhere. Wherever men love gardens they 
 know the name of Cannell, and this name, so linked with 
 flowers, is linked with pity, too, for the business he made 
 passed out of his hands, and he who made our gardens rich 
 died poor. 
 
 But we have to get to town, and we are not yet through 
 the strawberry fields. Ahead are the woods of St. Mary 
 Cray, and we are never quite sure which window to look 
 out from. The water that runs from the hills into the 
 little Cray flows through some pleasant places. Paul's 
 Cray, Foot's Cray, North Cray, or Mary Cray we can do 
 much worse than ramble through them on a summer's day. 
 
 In the choir of the church at North Cray, years ago, 
 was a schoolboy who grew up to be Sims Reeves and to 
 sing in half the countries in the world. In a cottage here 
 one of our Prime Ministers died. Take a big map of
 
 170 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Australia, and you will find a Foot's Cray there, a thriving 
 town of 20,000 people named from this hamlet in Kent, 
 and old men still living by the Cray will tell you of that 
 carpenter who built the steeple of North Cray Church, who 
 went out to Australia and built a great exhibition, a great 
 cathedral, and a pile of Government buildings, and at 
 length became Mayor of Sydney. We may be sure he 
 often remembered his days by the Cray, and he stamped 
 his memory of it on the map by giving the name to a town 
 on the Yarra river near Melbourne. 
 
 There was another old builder by the Cray who built 
 the chimney of the paper-mills. He built it alone ; every 
 brick he laid with his own hands. It was said of him that 
 he was a very slow old man, and his master said that if he 
 moved much slower he would not move at all. But that 
 was said by a man who moved very quickly and did great 
 things William Joynson, the founder of the paper-mills. 
 You have surely written a letter on his paper ; everywhere 
 the good notepaper made by the Cray has gone into the 
 homes of our British people. 
 
 We run quickly through these little places where we 
 would gladly stay, and we can only give a moment to the 
 memory of these people who have lived their lives and left 
 their mark in these quiet corners of Kent. We have only 
 time to think of their names before a rabbit scuttles up 
 the sandy bank, or a little brown squirrel darts up a tree, 
 or a startled pheasant shoots out from the grass, or a 
 friendly lark bids us forget the world and soar with it to 
 heaven. Nature and men play for our interest all the time 
 whenever we come by train, and, flying through these woods, 
 Nature wins us easily. We know what Mrs. Browning felt 
 when she saw such scenes as these, and wrote of them :
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 171 
 
 I flattered all the beauteous country round 
 The happy violets hiding from the road 
 The primroses run down to, carrying gold ; 
 Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist, 
 Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills ; 
 And cattle grazing in the watered vales, 
 And cottage chimneys smoking from the woods, 
 And cottage gardens smelling everywhere ; 
 And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped 
 And clapped my hands, and called all very fair. 
 
 Through scenes like these we come to that fair kingdom 
 where London begins to begin. Gardens and lovely 
 houses creep up the hillside. There are homes such as 
 homes should be, with broad streets and room for all to 
 breathe, and room for trees to grow and spread, and we 
 feel that here, at Chislehurst and Bickley, God's country 
 meets man's town. They will tell you of caves and dene- 
 holes here, and you can roam for hours beneath this 
 glorious face of Kent. The dene-holes are only chalk pits, 
 and not caves of mystery and history, as the people say, 
 but the charm and interest of these hills is on the surface 
 and not beneath. 
 
 Beyond us lies the chief town that we pass on our ride 
 to the Thames Bromley, with its pleasant roads that 
 lead us near to a common ablaze with gold ; to the home 
 of William Pitt, who saved England when England saved 
 Europe ; to the tree where Pitt and Wilberforce sat resting 
 when the great crusader pledged his life to the freeing of 
 the slaves. It is a ride of stirring thoughts for those who 
 think. But before we have time to think we are watching 
 the houses climbing up the hill to Shortlands. 
 
 We are getting farther from the lanes and nearer to 
 the streets, and we go on past the long country street of
 
 172 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Beckenham, through all the unloveliness of Kent House 
 and Penge, until we dive into the earth again under the 
 glittering towers and domes of the Crystal Palace. Not 
 even the directors of the railway could be expected to 
 say a pleasant word for this foul Penge Tunnel, a shame 
 to the men who built it and the Government that allows 
 it, but they bring us through it quickly, and it has, at 
 any rate, the distinction of being guarded by the first 
 electric railway signal in the world. (Strange, by the 
 way, that it should bring us in a minute more within sight 
 of London's first electric trains.) 
 
 But here is Dulwich, with its stately college, its pleasant 
 and famous bowling-green, and its old-world lanes, in one 
 of which lies that lovely little gallery of art, where the 
 benefactor sleeps amid the pictures he bequeathed. 
 Through a gate in this lane we walk and look at more than 
 one immortal canvas, as John Ruskin used to do. 
 
 I like to think, as we near Herne Hill, that here John 
 Ruskin used to walk about. For eighty years his house 
 in Denmark Hill was associated with his life or with his 
 memory. He would sit here sketching long before our 
 railway came, and in those days of long ago he used to 
 think that a little road our train runs over was one of 
 the prettiest country lanes he knew. 
 
 Old Dulwich Village has not greatly changed since 
 Ruskin was a boy here. Here was open country then, 
 and in later years John Ruskin used to say that one of 
 his greatest books could never have been written except 
 in the purer air of sixty years ago. He would look out, 
 as he sat among his books, to the moving clouds above 
 the fields, and they would greatly inspire his thought; 
 and we pass over a road which was then a little lane, with
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 173 
 
 hedges from which Ruskin and his mother used to gather 
 hawthorn, and where, as he grew up, he used to work in 
 the summer's shadows "as in a place wilder and sweeter 
 than our garden, to think over any passage I wanted to 
 make better than usual." In his own garden he learned 
 to love trees, and to understand seeds and fruits, and to 
 love Nature so much that in saying his prayers he would 
 ask that the frost might not touch the almond blossom. 
 
 We are nearing town; we can stand on Herne Hill 
 Station and see the Union Jack fly over Parliament. And 
 now we see the sort of place that men have made of the 
 countryside. Who does not thrill as he approaches 
 London, with its hundred square miles and more packed 
 with the busy lives, the happy lives, the awful lives, the 
 noble lives, of men and women ? You will find more 
 happiness and misery in London than anywhere on earth. 
 If you choose your walk in London, you will find it not 
 less like the gate of heaven than the hill we left an hour 
 ago in Kent ; but there are miles of streets crammed with 
 sin and cruelty, and unfit for human beings. 
 
 We do not see much of miserable London as we come 
 to town, but it is sad to see the gasping in the little back 
 yards for a touch of that natural world through which 
 we have been passing. It is sad to see how the very 
 breath of life is turned to gold in London town. That is 
 what it means when space is packed with bricks and 
 mortar, so that there is hardly room for a blade of grass, 
 and the air must steal through narrow passages and 
 stagnate in close back yards. Have you noticed the life 
 of the scullery roof, the little flat roof which is often the 
 only place that people have to hang out clothes or to put 
 a box of flowers ? You will see a chair out there some-
 
 174 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 times, to which somebody creeps from a bedroom window 
 for a rest in the open air. So much has space been turned 
 to gold in these long rows of houses that they must hang 
 the little tin bath on a nail outside. 
 
 You will see a little glass workshop set up on a roof. 
 You will see back-yards like tables piled up with rubbish. 
 In one is a heap of thousands of empty bottles ; in another 
 are hundreds of old tin cans. But they are not all rubbish 
 heaps, these little yards. Some are kitchen gardens now, 
 full of potatoes, and some always have been the prettiest 
 little places you could see. To some the back-yard is a 
 workshop look at this man mending his little boy's hobby- 
 horse ; but to others it is their corner of Nature's kingdom, 
 and here they have learned the lesson that if you will take 
 a pocketful of seed and give it to Nature she will set the 
 powers of all the universe to work on it and make your 
 yard a garden fit for kings. 
 
 We ride above the houses and the tree-tops, we see the 
 sun on glittering towers and domes, and as the buildings 
 crowd together, and the long lines of houses seem never 
 to end, and tramways and railways cross everywhere, even 
 here the trees raise up their heads. Even in Wai worth we 
 catch sight of trees, and here, in our very shadow, is that 
 little Beresford Chapel where John Ruskin and Burne- Jones 
 both sat as boys. The preacher Ruskin listened to is said 
 to have been " a sort of pope " among the chapel folk of 
 those days, and much too great a man, apparently, for 
 boys to dare to speak to; but little John would walk up 
 and down these streets to see him pass. On Sundays he 
 would sit as still as a mouse, watching the preacher in 
 the four-legged box of a pulpit decorated with a crimson 
 cushion with gold tassels, and he has written that he
 
 A RIDE IN GOD'S COUNTRY 175 
 
 liked that cushion because, when he was tired of the 
 sermon, he used to watch the rich colour of the folds and 
 creases in the crimson velvet when the preacher thumped it. 
 
 But there would be no end if we began to think of half 
 the men who come into our ride as we are nearing town, 
 passing through the home of Shakespeare's plays till we 
 reach the full glory of Christopher Wren. We cross the 
 Thames, with its ceaseless pageant of moving barges and 
 people, with the great Tower Bridge to the east and the 
 Houses of Parliament to the west, and we stop in full 
 sight of the dome of St. Paul's. 
 
 We have seen the world from a train; we have been 
 for an hour, if you will, sitting at the pictures, watching 
 the kinema of the world go by, and we have remembered 
 only half the things that we have seen. Whatever you 
 want to see is here towns and hamlets, woods and farms, 
 busy streets and quiet places, babbling streams and 
 laughing children, people at work and people at play. And 
 nearly all the way has been beautiful. If there are ugly 
 places in man's town, some parts of it such parts of it, 
 say, as the little garden at Kensington over which King 
 Peter Pan presides are not unworthy of God's country, 
 and we look up, as the train slows down by the Thames, 
 at the glittering cross above London. We have come to 
 Heaven's Gate again. If there are larks on the hills of 
 Kent, there are doves around St. Paul's. 
 
 And the lark said, Give us Glory, 
 And the dove said, Give us Peace. 
 
 We cry for both, and we find them here if we know 
 where and how to look. The glory is about us everywhere ; 
 the peace is in the hearts of those who seek it.
 
 THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS 
 
 THE glory of our summer bursts upon us, and our 
 Island, for a hundred days, is unmatched in all the world. 
 
 We rightly love this precious stone set in the silver 
 sea. No corner of the whole wide earth has a heart more 
 pure, a soul more free, than England, nor is there in the 
 world a face so sweet. Other countries are for us to see; 
 our Island is to live in. Since Julius Caesar found her 
 beautiful the traveller from the corners of the world has 
 come and found her fair to see. 
 
 And in her Hundred Days she is as the very gate of 
 heaven. Through trailing clouds of glory do we ride, in 
 this land which is our home. Who that has yet been born 
 can ride through the long lane that winds and winds and 
 seems to have no end, and burst upon a heath ablaze with 
 gold, and not be stirred within ? Who with a love of life 
 can rise and rise on our noble roads, and reach the heights 
 from which the plain of England seems to be sleeping, 
 and not be moved by the thought of this quiet land ? 
 
 The wonder is, to those who know the loveliness of 
 England, that England is so quiet. These heights of ours 
 how few have looked down from them ! These pictures 
 in our Natural Gallery how few have seen them ! These 
 narrow winding ways that lead to sights undreamed of 
 how few have found them out I Perhaps, in some day 
 to come, our railways may open the gates of the country- 
 side to the poor people doomed to dwell in towns. 
 
 176
 
 FROM A HILL-TOP IN KENT, KITS COTY HOUSE, THE GRAVE OF AN ANCIENT SOLDIER. 
 LOOKS DOWN ON THE RED-ROOFED VILLAGE OF AYLESFORD. WHERE WAS FOUGHT THE 
 FIRST-KNOWN BATTLE ON ENGLISH SOIL 
 
 [See Page 98
 
 THE DAYS WHEN COAL WAS BEING FORMED IN THE ISLAND. PROBABLY 2O MILLION YEARS AGO 
 
 
 THE DAYS OF THE GREAT REPTILES AND THE FLYING DRAGON, PROBABLY I 2 MILLION YEARS AGO 
 
 THE DAYS WHEN THE WHITE WALLS OF DOVER WERE BEING BUILT UP, PROBABLY 8 MILLION YEARS AGO 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE ISLAND IN THE DAYS LONG PAST 
 
 See Page 134
 
 THE DAYS WHEN THE GIANT SLOTH ATE OFF THE TOPS OF TREES, PROBABLY A MILLION YEARS AGO 
 
 THE ISLAND IN THE ICE AGE THE DAYS OF THE MAMMOTH AND THE GREAT CAVE BEAR, PROBABLY 
 
 400,000 YEARS AGO 
 
 THE CONQUEROR OF THE ISLAND MAN 
 
 THE LANDSCAPE BURIED IN THE EARTH DEEP DOWN BENEATH AN 
 
 ENGLISH WOOD 
 
 (See Page 124
 
 A CORRIDOR IN THE NORMAN KEEP AT ROCHESTER 
 
 THE ANCIENT GLORY THAT THE CONQUEROR SAW-THE MOST IMPRESSIVE NORMAN 
 RUIN STILL STANDING: THE KEEP AT ROCHESTER 
 
 [See Past 101
 
 THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS 177 
 
 Perhaps, in some far-off age, a train may really travel 
 sixty miles an hour, and there may really be a train when 
 people can take it, and a station where people would like 
 it ; and the cities and towns will pour out their cramped-up 
 tenants, and the English people will discover England. 
 It will be a very great discovery. 
 
 And then, when the great spaces of the Island have 
 become accessible to those who own them when it is as 
 easy for an English family to visit Hindhead Beacon as 
 to visit Amsterdam, there will be tours to the Great Sights 
 of our Island on her Hundred Days. Not Egypt, with 
 its old-age glory; not India, with its gorgeous panoply; 
 not Italy, unfolding the past before our eyes, has more 
 surprise in her keeping than the Home of the English has 
 waiting for her people when they come out to see. 
 
 There is something saddening in the thought of genera- 
 tions of people who have lived their lives, have toiled to 
 make us a great nation, and have passed away not knowing 
 how fair a land was spread about them. For a thousand 
 years men have moved about the earth no faster or farther 
 than a horse could carry them, and even then, and after- 
 wards when railways came, men moved along main roads, 
 always the same way. So that only a few could know 
 the natural glories that were growing up about them, and 
 even these saw the world only from well-trodden paths. 
 How little they knew of our homeland, even her kings and 
 queens ! 
 
 Those of us who love the countryside love most of all, 
 perhaps, Old Yew, the silent sentinel of English life for a 
 thousand years. He threw his branches over the men 
 who surveyed the Island for the Conqueror. He saw the 
 knight come back from Holy Land. He saw the villein 
 
 N
 
 178 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 working the land for his lord. He saw the feudal lord 
 brought from the great house to rest under the little church 
 tower. He gave the men their bows for Agincourt. He 
 saw the labourer rise and mutiny; he knew that Charles 
 the First was dead. He nodded his head for a hundred 
 years to the coach that passed that way. And then the 
 road was quiet, for the old coach stopped, and nobody 
 seemed to pass, until at last an ancient power drawn from 
 the earth came to this place and met Old Yew. It came 
 not slowly, but as if the pent-up life of a thousand years 
 were rushing past. The old yew bowed to the motor-car 
 bowed, no doubt, to the power inside it lying old in the 
 earth before the yew was young and it would be a pretty 
 thing if, as men raise their hats to greatness, motor-cars 
 would pause a moment to salute these wayside sentinels 
 that have stood in the wind and rain while the ages have 
 passed by. 
 
 Merrily we run up the hills and steadily we come down ; 
 through the narrow shades and across the broad spaces 
 of sunlight, dipping into the valleys, sweeping over the 
 plains, mounting up the hills, through the quiet greenlands, 
 over the blazing heath, past the great patches of purple 
 and red and gold. 
 
 The heath is afire with red and gold and all our little 
 world is like a window into paradise. Our lanes are fit for 
 angels' feet; our woods are heaven's own temples. And 
 all about us, over the little gates, up the long drives, behind 
 the old stone walls, are those richest treasures in our 
 Island's crown, our gardens. We have no need to die to 
 go to heaven. 
 
 I lie in a little boat among the flowers, with the ripple 
 of the water under me, the glory of the sky above me, the
 
 THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS 179 
 
 wonder of a growing garden all about me; and through 
 the roses, and across the lawn, at the back of the orchard, 
 a choir from the ends of the earth is singing, singing the 
 song no man has written, set to music no man has thought 
 of; a choir of sixty little travellers that fly about all day 
 in the sun, as happy as a bird should be. But for the 
 song and the wind, and the splash of the water when a 
 flash of gold leaps out to greet the sun, there is no sound. 
 
 A dove flies out of the wood and drinks at the lake, as 
 a pheasant flew out of the wood on a black night last week 
 and stunned itself against my lighted window. The boat 
 drifts round and round, bringing new peeps of climbing 
 roses, of bamboos blowing in the wind, of white cerastium 
 and blue veronica creeping over the stones, of reflections 
 in the water worth all the Turners and Raphaels and 
 Gainsboroughs that were ever hung on a wall. And I say 
 in my heart, as I lie in my boat and write this, that not 
 for a rich man's income would I give up these treasures 
 that a poor man has, that Nature showers on those who 
 love her, asking nothing but their love for all she gives, 
 and giving health and wealth and wisdom for all she takes. 
 
 For every poor man sitting in the sun this morning, 
 if he could but know, is a king indeed, heir to all the sun's 
 great gifts to earth, king of all the realm of Nature if he 
 will but listen to her voice. How soft and quiet is her 
 voice, so still that so few hear it, yet so full of power that 
 those who hear it rule the earth ! Poets have heard it if 
 statesmen have not, and we remember how it came to 
 Matthew Arnold, who wrote : 
 
 One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee, 
 One lesson that on every wind is blown,
 
 180 
 
 and then went on to write those other lines : 
 
 Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring, 
 Man's fitful labour mingling with his toil, 
 Still do thy sleepless ministers move on, 
 Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; 
 Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, 
 Labourers that shall not fail when man is gone. 
 
 The sleepless ministers of Nature have made our 
 Island fair to see beneath the summer sun, and where upon 
 the face of this fair earth is anything so lovely as an English 
 garden? Ah, if William Hohenzollern could have loved 
 a garden such as mine ! 
 
 This poor and stricken earth might now have been a 
 happy place. If he could have learned the lesson that on 
 every wind is blown ; if he could have known the yearning 
 for the sun in the heart of a rose ; if he could have felt the 
 power of those universal armies that never since the world 
 was made have failed to win back summer from the grip 
 of winter if Queen Victoria's daughter's son had thought 
 of these things, how changed a place the face of this sad 
 earth might be ! 
 
 He could have sat in his garden, have dreamed 
 of power, and been satisfied. He could have said to an 
 empty plain, " Be you a kingdom," and, lo ! the earth 
 itself would have done his bidding. Out of the plain there 
 would have risen a throne of red and gold. The larkspur 
 regiments would have taken up their lines, the gladioli 
 would have flung out leaves like swords; the yews and 
 firs, in long, proud avenues, would have stood still and 
 dumb while the king passed by. Here and there the great 
 scarlet poppies would have raised their heads like solitary 
 sentinels, the clumps of fir would have spread out like forts
 
 THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS 181 
 
 at distant points, the red -heads and the yellow table -tops 
 would have bowed down to him as he walked among them, 
 and on the borders of his kingdom there would have stood 
 on guard the long red dragons of fire and the long blue 
 spurs which simple folk who are not kaisers mighty have 
 thought to be larkspur and snapdragon. 
 
 And high above them all the great swinging hollyhocks 
 would have climbed, higher and higher and higher, always 
 at their observation posts, watching the ordered move- 
 ments of these forces arrayed about them the changing 
 of the regiments as one relieved another, the coming of 
 the foxgloves and the dahlias, the passing of the lilacs and 
 laburnums, and the long and patient service of the roses 
 while other regiments come and go. 
 
 Everywhere about him, in the shadow of his majestic 
 armies, a million-multitude of merry people would have 
 danced for joy. The little blue flax and the little red 
 saxifrage, arabis and sweet alyssum in their pure white 
 dresses, the daisies and pansies and geums sparkling as 
 if dressed in rainbows, would have spread a living carpet 
 at his feet that Solomon in all his glory hardly dreamed of. 
 Here, in this kingdom of peace, a kaiser's body might 
 have sat and a kaiser's soul been satisfied, for there is no 
 mastery like the mastery of the earth, like the ordering 
 and shaping and moulding of this power-house of all 
 mankind; and the lord of armies could have sat in a 
 garden and heard the birds sing the song that Richard 
 Watson Gilder gave them : 
 
 Great Nature is an army gay, 
 Resistless marching on its way ; 
 I hear the bugles clear and sweet, 
 I hear the tread of million feet.
 
 182 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It makes its way, this army gay, to every haunt and 
 corner; it creeps up to the cottage gate and round the 
 palace walls, and it stretches out beyond the plain for 
 him who dreams of empires in the sun. 
 
 Across the plain I see it pour ; 
 I hear a thousand cannon roar. 
 It swarms within my garden gate ; 
 My deepest well it drinketh dry. 
 It doth not rest, it doth not wait ; 
 By day and night it sweepeth by. 
 
 It carries its banners in triumph; it dances with 
 delight ; it hangs its head as in defeat. 
 
 And now the banners all are bright, 
 Now torn and blackened by the fight. 
 Sometimes its laughter shakes the sky, 
 Sometimes the groans of those who die. 
 
 But there is no wearying and no ending to this army 
 that the Kaiser might have had if he had loved a garden ; 
 there is no exhaustion from which it can never recover. 
 
 Still through the night, and through the livelong day, 
 The infinite army marches on its remorseless way. 
 
 Sitting in his garden, watching the changes that come 
 in the stillness, stirred by the silence that works so mightily, 
 the Kaiser would have thought of other kinds of battle- 
 fields. He would have found a nobler thing to look upon 
 than a wilderness made from a smiling land. He would 
 have seen the glories of the earth that come and go, and 
 there would have come to him the vision of the earth as 
 God meant it to be when He planted man in a garden. 
 He would have seen that, as flowers come and go and fill 
 the earth with beauty, so generations of men and women
 
 THE ISLAND'S HUNDRED DAYS 183 
 
 should come and go and live beautiful lives ; and, building 
 up a great nation, he would have turned the brains of his 
 wise men to sweet and noble things. 
 
 He would have found a peaceful way to fame and power, 
 and left a name to live for ever as an inspiration to man- 
 kind. Loving Nature and her quiet ways, he would have 
 followed them. He would have built up a great army, 
 but it would have been an army of free men. He would 
 have led it into war, but it would have been a war against 
 evil, in the name of good; a war against disease, in the 
 name of health; a war against ignorance, in the name 
 of knowledge. It would have been a war to break down 
 powers of darkness and sow the seeds of happiness wher- 
 ever people dwell. 
 
 And that foul war he made, born in the depths of hate 
 and envy, would not have been. Thousands of homes 
 burned to the ground would now be filled with happy 
 people; millions of men in their graves would now be 
 loving and toiling for their fellows. How many widows 
 would still be happy wives, how many orphans would still 
 be climbing on a father's knee ! How many hospitals 
 could have been turned into temples of art if the money 
 spent in crowding them with broken men had been spent 
 in conquering pain 1 How many noble causes languishing 
 for help could have been endowed with boundless wealth 1 
 Not a slum in Europe could have held up its head if our 
 guns had been turned on them instead of on our living 
 men; not a family in Europe need have been without a 
 lovely home if the cost of the war had been spent in making 
 homes instead of breaking them. 
 
 God took man and put him in a garden, but William 
 Hohenzollern scorned the will of God. The quiet ways
 
 184 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 were not for him; it was not enough for him that men 
 and women should be kind and natural. He must march 
 across the earth and leave it bare to show the power he had. 
 But the day was to come, and when it came it would 
 have paid this man of blood a millionfold if he had thrown 
 his crown into the dust and loved a garden.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE OF THE ISLAND
 
 It is not to be thought of that the flood 
 
 Of British freedom . . . 
 
 Should perish ; and to evil and to good 
 
 Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung 
 
 Armoury of the invincible knights of old ; 
 
 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 
 That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
 
 Which Milton held. 
 
 Wordsworth.
 
 THE WATCHWORD OF THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 KEEP YOUR WORD 
 
 August 4, 1914 
 
 THE Island has passed into the Valley of the Shadow 
 of Death. Europe is breaking to pieces because the 
 German Emperor broke his word. 
 
 Life is not worth living if men break their word. If 
 we cannot believe a man we can have no dealings with 
 him, either buying or selling. We buy a thing in a shop 
 believing it to be what it is said to be ; we take the shop- 
 man's word, and if he speaks the truth we buy from him 
 again. If he sells us brass and tells us it is gold, we buy 
 from him no more, and his trade is ruined. Men cannot 
 prosper on a broken word. 
 
 We could have no home to live in if men did not keep 
 their word. We trust our neighbours. They declare 
 themselves friendly, and we believe them. We live side 
 by side with hundreds of people who could rob us or poison 
 us, but they live at peace with us instead; they have 
 " given their word," and we believe them. We go to bed 
 at night, we leave our homes by day, because we believe 
 that men will keep their word. 
 
 We could not travel if men did not keep their word. 
 We go into a strange country and trust our lives and our 
 money to people we have never seen before, perhaps to 
 people whose language we do not understand. But here, 
 
 187
 
 188 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 also, runs the honourable understanding of men who keep 
 their word. A strange man takes our bag, another takes 
 our money, another carries an important letter. We go 
 on our way because we trust them all. We take their 
 word. 
 
 There is neither work nor wages for us if we break our 
 word. We work for a week or a month on a promise that 
 our wages will be paid. Men give us their labour, and we 
 give them ours, because we pledge our word. We put our 
 money into the bank, we leave our watch at the watch- 
 maker's, we trust a man with an important piece of infor- 
 mation, we risk our very lives, on the promise of a word. 
 
 A nation trusts its people, keeping police for those who 
 break their word. And a nation trusts other nations, 
 binding itself to do certain things so that there may be 
 order and good government and understanding in the world. 
 Britain, France, and Germany gave their word to Belgium, 
 and Belgium trusted them. Now Germany has broken 
 her word, and asked Britain to break hers. But the Island 
 will not lie. She is too proud to break her word. She 
 is fighting against the broken word that would destroy our 
 homes, our trade, our freedom, and the good name that 
 is so dear throughout the world. 
 
 We must be free, or die ; and we who speak the tongue 
 that Shakespeare spoke must keep our word.
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 
 
 Sent into space on the wings of 
 Imagination in August 1914 
 
 FOR many years the dreamers of our Earth have been 
 trying to speak to you, my dear Martian, and have been 
 imagining all sorts of ways in which a message from this 
 planet might be sent to yours. And now at last, the 
 human race on this globe being at the height of its powers, 
 we may hope that the invisible waves that carry our 
 messages round the earth will bring them up to you. 
 
 You will have noticed, perhaps, as you have looked 
 out upon the Earth through your powerful telescopes, the 
 great shadows that have passed over the face of our planet 
 in these last few weeks. You will have seen the long black 
 lines moving slowly across the great level spaces of one of 
 our continents. And, of course, you will have been 
 wondering what this movement means; you will have 
 asked yourself what mighty change can now be taking 
 place on this distant planet in which no Martian has ever 
 observed such movements before. 
 
 We, too, have wondered at the changes that take place 
 in Mars, when it seems to us that the great ice-caps at 
 your Poles melt and run down through immense canals; 
 and all men here who study Mars hope that this is really 
 so, for they like to think that, in the presence of a great 
 catastrophe, the population of your planet joined together 
 to avert it or to help one another in meeting it. 
 
 189
 
 190 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 It is the greatest thing that we on Earth have yet been 
 able to imagine, this coming together of the whole race of 
 Mars to drive back its great peril of perishing from thirst ; 
 and these moving lines of Mars these rushing waters, as 
 some have called them are the only sign that we yet 
 know suggesting living beings in another world. So it 
 occurs to me that, looking down upon our Earth in these 
 days, you may have wondered at the moving masses of 
 black specks that you would see, and have asked yourself 
 what mighty planetary change can now be coming over 
 this old world. 
 
 That is what I want to tell you. You will know some- 
 thing, through the wise men of Mars who study other 
 worlds, of the story of our Earth. You will have found 
 out something of its marvellous history since it was 
 fashioned from a cloud of red-hot gas. You will know 
 that it has rolled through the immensities of space for 
 hundreds of millions of years, cooling down and adapting 
 itself, by the operation of unfailing laws, to be the home 
 of Life. You will have noticed its majestic features, and 
 you will surely have learned from your wise men something 
 of the natural influences that built up our Earth through 
 millions of years. 
 
 At last, the planet being quite ready for him, came 
 Man, with something in him that no other creature had. 
 For ages he fought and conquered the mammoth and the 
 bear, and lived in caves to protect himself from wolves 
 and tigers, and then, just as we in our time have found 
 the power of the black diamonds laid down in the earth, 
 so the men of long ago found the power of the white stone 
 laid down in the sea : they found the flints, and sharpened 
 them, and fashioned them, and made them into knives
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 191 
 
 and hammer-heads and files, and with these simple tools 
 Man set out to win the lordship of the Earth. 
 
 He killed what animals he wanted. He built houses 
 in trees where animals could not climb, or in the midst of 
 waters where enemies could not reach him. He learned 
 to dig the earth and bring forth fruit, while Woman learned 
 to sew the skins of animals with her bone needles. He 
 learned to make fire and to ride over water, and when the 
 world grew so cold that great parts of it were buried in ice 
 Man was so strong and brave and clever that he did not 
 perish from the Earth. For Man was learning, even then, 
 to master Nature by obeying her, and sun and wind and 
 rain were Man's allies. 
 
 There has been much sunshine and storm since then, 
 and Man no longer fights with sticks and stones, or sails 
 on rafts, or uses tools of flint. It is true that it seems 
 only a few years since men ceased to be barbarians, and 
 lived together in cities, generally at peace with each other, 
 but the years have been crowded with wonder and power, 
 so that in a hundred years of our own time mankind has 
 marched farther than in a million years before. Our 
 printed books tell us of things that happened three thou- 
 sand years ago, or four thousand, or five, but men have 
 found writing and pictures in stone of actual kings and 
 empires ten thousand years ago. 
 
 In the midst of a great desert as you look down from 
 Mars, on the banks of a white river about half as long as 
 our Earth is wide, you may see, perhaps, a huge black 
 shadow thrown across the sand. It is a stupendous mass 
 of stones set up in Egypt by a king of great conceit, and 
 we know from this that men have been mighty con- 
 structors, and that nations and forms of government have
 
 192 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 been in existence for certainly ten thousand years not 
 long, perhaps, but seeming long to us on Earth, who 
 reckon Time in hours, and live, on the average, only 
 twelve years or so into our full manhood. 
 
 All through these hundred centuries men have been 
 marching forward, and our history is an almost continuous 
 record of nations and empires and their rise and fall. 
 There have been the great builders and warriors of Assyria 
 and Babylon and Egypt. There was Moses, the greatest 
 public health administrator in the world, five thousand 
 years ago and more. There was Greece, with heroes whose 
 fame will never die, with artists whose glorious works are 
 with us still, with Socrates, whose wise and gentle ways, 
 with his pure love of truth, endear him to the human race 
 fifty lifetimes after his immortal farewell to the world. 
 
 And after the glory that was Greece came the grandeur 
 that was Rome, the empire of the Caesars, wide and 
 colossal enough, almost, to have made some impression 
 upon Mars. It is in ruins now, but we can walk among 
 the remnants of its glories still, and fancy that its rulers 
 are living still, so near are they in history, and so familiar 
 have their names become to us. 
 
 I have not time to tell you now of the greatest of all 
 the things that have ever happened on our Earth, the birth 
 of Jesus Christ. No great event was ever shadowed forth 
 in such humility. He was born, on the greatest day in 
 the history of our planet, in an almost unknown village in 
 Asia, at a time when the Roman Empire was also at its 
 birth ; He was murdered by the Roman Empire to please 
 a Roman mob ; but the great cause that He founded the 
 cause of peace and charity and goodwill to all men, the 
 faith in one God who guides and rules mankind, the loyalty
 
 THIS WAS THE WORLD, AND I WAS KING 
 
 And all about was mine, I said, 
 The little sparrows overheard. 
 The little minnows, too 
 
 This was the world, and I was king ; 
 For me the bees came by to sing. 
 For me the swallows flew.
 
 JULIUS CAESAR WRITING A LETTER TO ROME FROM HIS TENT IN KENT 
 
 [See Chapter 7
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 193 
 
 of comrades, the love of country, and unfaltering trust in 
 that eternal righteousness which Socrates never doubted 
 has endured and burned itself into the hearts of men 
 wherever men may be, and is the most potent influence 
 still existing on the Earth today. 
 
 Until the dawn of the new age which followed on the 
 birth of Jesus, who was called the Prince of Peace, the 
 great power of the w T orld was the sword. With the power 
 of the sword men won new lands from weaker peoples ; the 
 Earth or those parts of the Earth that were known 
 belonged to the strongest men with the sharpest sword. 
 And so empires and kingdoms rose and fell Babylon and 
 Egypt, Greece and Rome, with all their stupendous achieve- 
 ments, ceased to be. Once or twice in the history of the 
 world the power of an empire became so great and so wide- 
 spread that one man's word was law throughout the known 
 world, and for age after age the history of the world, as 
 it is recorded in our annals, seemed to be no more than 
 the hagglings and fightings of this man and that man for 
 territorial sway. The common people were their slaves or 
 soldiers, and on the least excuse they were led to slaughter, 
 in great armies, to settle some paltry quarrel of their 
 master, or to hold some threatened territory in which he 
 ruled over an unwilling race, or for some other cause which 
 they may have neither cared about nor understood. 
 
 Now and then a good king would arise, with a love of 
 humanity in him ; but the names of such kings stand out 
 as the sun in the heavens in the long list of tyrants and 
 ruffians and simpletons who managed generally to hold 
 the reins of power. The vainglory of one man in the story 
 of our Earth is said to have consumed eight million lives. 
 
 You will see how badly things must have gone with
 
 194 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 this old world in those days, when the condition of the 
 hundreds of millions of people on the Earth was such that 
 they allowed themselves to be the slaves and tools of 
 a handful of clever men who had brains to see their 
 opportunity and to use it. Men of all races, speaking all 
 languages, subjected themselves to a few kings and despots, 
 who obtained supreme authority and wielded a sway which 
 gave them power of life and death over the great numbers 
 of the people. You will perhaps have seen, looking down 
 from Mars, the five land masses of our Earth. They are 
 all inhabited now, but only two of them have ancient 
 histories that we know much about. Africa has been kept 
 back from its place in the upward movement of mankind 
 by a mosquito. Australia is still an almost empty con- 
 tinent, save for strange forms of life, some remnants of a 
 dying race, and enough white people to fill one or two 
 great cities ; and America took its place among the nations 
 of our Earth only a few centuries ago. It was in Asia, 
 the spacious home of hundreds of mingled races, that most 
 of the old history of this world was worked out ; and it 
 is in Europe, Asia's next-door neighbour, that the life 
 of the world is centred now. 
 
 It is here, on this continent which holds all that is best 
 and noblest on Earth, that a new kind of nation has been 
 born. It is in Europe that men have been drawn together, 
 not as the slaves and tools of kings, but as comrades in a 
 common life. A long way man has come since the old 
 empires fell to pieces, and men discovered that they were 
 something more than sticks and stones. 
 
 It would not be possible to give you any idea of the 
 change that came over our Earth when the hundreds of 
 millions of people in Europe arranged themselves in groups
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 195 
 
 and nations, and took into their own hands the power 
 which, in older times, the kings had held over them. It 
 happened very slowly, and many nations kept their kings ; 
 but the kings were mostly wiser than the kings of old, and 
 some were wisely limited in their powers. 
 
 And therefore, though men had not yet become quite 
 free, they were released from the ancient bondage, they 
 were no longer bound fast to the thrones of kings and tied 
 to the chariot - wheels ; they had something more to live 
 for than to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water 
 and slayers of their fellow-men. At last men were lords 
 of themselves, and, with freedom to do as they would, 
 with the sword no longer hanging over them, a few men 
 changed the world for all the rest. 
 
 They studied Nature and tried to understand her, and 
 there is hardly a thing that is the same as when these men 
 began. For thousands of years men had travelled about 
 as fast as a horse could carry them, and no faster; then 
 a clever man found out the power of a drop of boiling 
 water, and from that day drops of boiling water have 
 carried men across the earth and over the sea in thousands 
 at a time, faster than any horse could carry one. For 
 thousands of years men groped about in darkness, and 
 the work of the world ended when the sun went down; 
 then a clever man found that the black diamonds buried 
 in the earth carried, hidden within them, the sunlight of 
 past ages, and lo t men turned night into day. 
 
 For thousands of years the lives of men were destroyed 
 by terrible diseases, and vast regions of the earth were 
 uninhabitable by the great civilising races; then a great 
 man found that the bodies of human beings are inhabited 
 by unseen living creatures which steal away our strength,
 
 196 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 and myriads of lives are saved which, without this know- 
 ledge, must have perished. So the power of knowledge 
 saves countless lives, and makes life more worth living, too. 
 
 With our own eyes we could never have seen the 
 wonderful suggestion of life on Mars, but one of our 
 scientists made an instrument which carries a man's eyes 
 a million times farther than they can reach themselves, 
 and so we know some parts of other worlds better than 
 some parts of our own. Another instrument of science 
 takes our sight down into things invisible to naked eyes, 
 so that we can see, for instance, down into the very 
 structure of a thing too small to pick up in our fingers; 
 and we can see, thanks to other marvellous inventions, 
 through stone walls, or actually into the living body of a 
 human being. Man has made a little black box which 
 will make a permanent picture of anything he sees, so that 
 he can see it again at will. He has made another box that 
 preserves a man's voice, so that it can be heard long after 
 the man himself is dead. We can sit in a room and talk 
 softly into a telephone that carries our words across 
 thousands of miles ; we can be in one continent and com- 
 municate instantly with another; we can fly up in the 
 air to a height of five miles, can go down in the sea and 
 stay there for hours, can send a ship to sea without a soul 
 on board and bid it turn as we will. All these things men 
 are learning to do. Man is multiplying his power a million 
 times. He is bringing the whole Earth under his sway, 
 is giving longer life to the race and making life more worth 
 having; and there is hardly anything we can conceive 
 that seems beyond our powers. 
 
 The spread of knowledge, by books and papers which 
 make known ideas and discoveries to the ends of the
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 197 
 
 world, is the most pleasing thing that can be recorded of 
 our Earth. If tomorrow you were to be able to send a 
 reply to this message from Mars, we should be able to 
 send your message round our planet in less time than it 
 will take you to read this, and there is not a country in 
 which it would not be printed and discussed within a single 
 day. That is one of the supreme achievements of our 
 race the quick communication of thought. Perhaps it 
 has done more than anything else to set up sympathy 
 between our different nations. It has made our know- 
 ledge universal, so that there are today in all our greatest 
 cities universities where the wise men of the city gather 
 and teach the things they know. 
 
 And these wise men are themselves for ever learning, 
 experimenting, and discovering, and if one wise man 
 should find out some new thing, such as, let us say, the 
 cause of a terrible disease, the news would quickly reach 
 the others, and all over the world men in the universities 
 would search into it and seek to advance the discovery one 
 step farther, until they could put into men's hands a 
 weapon to destroy the cause and stamp out the disease. 
 All our Earth joins in the spread of knowledge, and in 
 this quest of wisdom all our peoples are as one. 
 
 And they are one, too, not only in the love of knowledge 
 for the 'sake of the happiness that knowledge brings, but 
 in the material interest that binds their lives together. 
 So closely bound together are the nations of our Earth 
 that no one could disappear, or even suffer serious loss, 
 without affecting all the others in some way. 
 
 One nation grows cotton and another nation buys it 
 and makes it into cloth ; and if a cotton crop should fail in 
 America a million people in Europe would be idle for want
 
 198 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 of it; a thousand mills would close, famine and poverty 
 would spread, the railways and ships which carry the 
 cotton would suffer, the thrifty people who have invested 
 their savings in the ships and railways would lose their 
 profits and would be poor in turn; and so in a hundred 
 ways the failure of a cotton crop at one side of our Earth 
 would be felt at the other side in the homes of the people. 
 That is true of cotton and of everything; we are bound 
 together we who speak a hundred tongues and never 
 see each other by the buying and selling of each other's 
 goods, the products of our toil. You cannot hurt any 
 part of our Earth without hurting another part too. 
 
 And now you will see how the nations of our Earth 
 resemble one great family, drawn together by an unselfish 
 love of knowledge and a selfish interest in their mutual 
 possessions as your own race on Mars, if we understand 
 aright, has been drawn together to fight the catastrophe 
 that threatened your planet. 
 
 We are a long, long way from the caves in which men 
 lived to hide from wild beasts, and the men who made 
 fire by striking flints together seem like the inhabitants 
 of another planet to us now. Yet we are only a few 
 thousand years removed from them, and I can hardly 
 make you realise what wonders have been packed into 
 these years. It has seemed that in the last two lifetimes 
 the world has been remade, so wonderful has been its 
 progress, so glorious has been the growth of knowledge, 
 so uplifting has been the spread of comradeship among 
 the people of the Earth. Those who have grown old can 
 hardly believe the things that have come about; those 
 who are young are dreaming of greater wonders still or 
 were dreaming, I should have said.
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 199 
 
 For all at once a Great Shadow has come upon our 
 world. Europe, through which flows the central stream 
 of the life of our Earth, has slipped back to the days of 
 sticks and stones. This continent of incalculable treasure, 
 built up by the sacrifice of countless heroes, enriched by 
 the labour of millions of men, the repository of the highest 
 wisdom of mankind, is in peril. 
 
 I am afraid the language of our poor Earth, though 
 with it Shakespeare stirred all men and sent emotion 
 throbbing through the centuries, would never make you 
 understand at once the truth about Europe which I have 
 kept back until now. I could not expect you to believe 
 that men who have come up from fighting like wild beasts, 
 and have conquered Nature by obeying her, have armed 
 themselves with all their marvellous powers to fight like 
 beasts again. Yet it seems on Earth just now, in the 
 midst of the glory of this summer day in 1914, that our 
 civilisation has all this time been like a mightier barbarism. 
 We have been like savages in civilised clothes, for never 
 have the nations of Europe been quite certain that one 
 would not begin to tear the others to pieces like wolves. 
 
 There is a sense in which it is true that the first aim 
 of all our Governments has been to arm themselves against 
 the hour when the tiger should break out in man; and 
 this tiger spirit has crept into the lives of all our peoples, 
 and the arming of the nations has cast a shadow over all 
 our lives. It has absorbed our best brains ; it has checked 
 our advance. It has sown the seeds of poverty and death 
 in the fair garden of the world. The greatest power that 
 men have been able to produce has been put into a gun, 
 and the most marvellous product of men's hands is a ship 
 armed with these guns. While children have died in
 
 200 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 millions for want of money to save them, rivers of gold 
 won by the people with their toil have been poured out 
 for the making of ships and guns, until there are enough of 
 them in Europe, I dare say, to blow the continent to bits. 
 
 It will astonish you that civilisation, instead of stamping 
 out this fighting instinct in a man, has organised it and 
 strengthened it, so that the real contest between nations 
 has now come to be determined, not by the best brain, 
 but by the biggest gun. Has it been worth "while, the 
 civilisation that has come to this ? 
 
 The continent of Europe is silent as I write. There 
 is a hush upon the world. The newspapers, which at other 
 times reflect for us each morning the life of Europe the 
 day before, know almost nothing. It is as if the world 
 slowed down for some supreme event. All that is known 
 on our Island is that across a narrow strip of sea, across 
 the plains of France, is a line 270 miles long, and on each 
 side of this line a million men are waiting to kill each other. 
 Not two of them, perhaps, really hate each other; but 
 an emperor has spoken and it must be done. 
 
 An emperor has spoken ! It is actually true, when these 
 words are being written, that in one great nation of Europe 
 one man still holds the ancient power of kings, one man 
 still sends his millions out to war. It is still true, too, that 
 power breeds greed of power, and it has come about that 
 there has arisen in the centre of Europe a War Lord at 
 whose word the nations could be called to arms. 
 
 Now he has called. He has made a war he might have 
 stayed. He has flung a bomb into the midst of our 
 friendly peoples, has broken his plighted word, has thrown 
 down the gauntlet to peaceful nations and dishonoured 
 his name forever through the world. This man has lighted
 
 A MESSAGE TO MARS 201 
 
 the powder magazines of Europe, has changed the peaceful 
 countries of a continent into a vast armed camp, and has 
 doomed to misery and death a countless host of human 
 beings who have done no wrong. Against his great nation 
 we have no word to say; it has given to Europe some of 
 its noblest treasures; its people are on the highest plane 
 of civilisation. But against the system^ which gives this 
 War Lord power to threaten Europe, to put back the clock 
 of progress for a hundred years, to destroy the commerce 
 of nations and break up the homes of the people, to scatter 
 ruin through a dozen smiling lands, Europe must say its 
 last word now. It can never be said again. 
 
 One little island race, though it pay the price with its 
 last man, will hold the fort for civilisation now. It has 
 sown the seed of freedom in every corner of the Earth. 
 It has carried peace and goodwill to one quarter of the 
 human race. It has freed the slaves and set free the mind 
 of man ; it has made its island home a sacred place where 
 any man can think the thing he will. Never did a nation 
 want Peace more, but the hand of the War Lord is against 
 her now, and Little Treasure Island, her honour outraged, 
 her freedom threatened, goes out on her Great Adventure. 
 
 The storm is gathering about us. The black shadows 
 move across the plain. Has it been worth while ? 
 
 It has. 
 
 It has been worth while to know the heights that man 
 can reach. It has been worth while to build up the 
 conscience of Europe which will never let this be again. It 
 has been worth while to see this lovely Earth at peace, and 
 all men nearly free. And it will be worth while to be alive 
 when this dark hour is over, to see the slow disarming 
 of the human race and the dawn of our Great Peace.
 
 THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 
 
 August 4, 1914 
 
 THE most terrible day in the history of the world has 
 come. Europe is fighting for the right to be free. 
 
 It is almost incredible; like some hideous dream the 
 appalling truth comes home to us, and now and then, 
 when the mind forgets it for a moment, the horrible reality 
 comes back in a flash, and we realise that life will never 
 be quite the same for us again. This lovely earth, this 
 Europe which is everything to us, is stricken and bleeding, 
 and there is hardly a happy home on this vast continent. 
 
 All through this golden summer Europe had been at 
 peace ; her four hundred million men and women and chil- 
 dren had been going their way gladly, making things for 
 one another, gathering in the harvests that were to build 
 up our strength for another year, most of them contributing 
 something to that pure joy of life which, after a thousand 
 years of war, had become the common right of all mankind. 
 
 As I write this, looking down on a beautiful valley in 
 Kent, with no sound but the rippling of the wind through 
 the trees and a child's voice across the corn, with the sun- 
 shine pouring down the sides of a hundred hills, it seems 
 impossible that the truth can be true ; and yet today the 
 face of our fair earth is stained with blood and strewn with 
 dead men's bones, and men who never hated one another 
 in their lives are lying in wait to tear each other to pieces 
 like wild beasts. 
 
 202
 
 THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 203 
 
 And all this has come upon our earth through one 
 dishonoured man. It is the German Emperor who has 
 broken the peace of the world ; it is our own King's friend 
 and guest who has sought to destroy our nation's freedom. 
 No man since the world began has committed such a sin as 
 he, for this man has dragged free Europe in the dust and 
 flung open the gates of barbarism that had been locked a 
 hundred years. He must be reckoned with the sort of 
 men who poison wells . From the height of a dazzling throne 
 he has flung a bomb which has set all Europe blazing. 
 
 The simple truth is that the German Emperor, without 
 warning or provocation, has wantonly attacked three 
 innocent countries, and that the attack, if it were to 
 succeed, would imperil the freedom and independence of 
 the Island. For nearly a generation he has been building 
 up a formidable navy, which could have had no other object 
 than hostility to England; and more than once the 
 Emperor has openly announced his hostility to England 
 and his jealousy of the British leadership of the world. 
 It was not enough that he should have the most highly- 
 organised army in Europe, the mere mention of which he 
 expected to create fear in the hearts of other nations ; he 
 set himself also to build up a powerful navy, second only 
 to our own. 
 
 To Little Treasure Island a navy means life or death ; 
 we have only a small army, and should starve if the Island 
 were invaded. To Germany a navy can mean nothing 
 of the kind, and the determination of the German Emperor 
 to possess a great army and a great navy too has filled all 
 Europe with grave anxiety. There has been no doubt 
 that this joint force, unparalleled in the history of any 
 nation and not called for by any necessity, was being raised
 
 204 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 in the centre of Europe to strike fear into the hearts of 
 the free nations of France and Britain, and especially 
 to break the power of Britain at sea. 
 
 The German people, against whom none of us has an 
 unfriendly word to say, has been deceived. Germany is 
 one of the greatest nations on the earth, welded together 
 by the union of a number of states after the victorious war 
 against France in 1870. It has grown strong and powerful 
 and has become the most scientific nation in the world, 
 and the people of Germany, the land from which the English 
 came, have millions of warm-hearted admirers in our little 
 Island. But Germany is not a democratic country; 
 whereas our own King reigns as head of the State and 
 acts through his Ministers, the German Emperor rules 
 above the State, and is not subject to the will of Parlia- 
 ment. He has the ancient power of despot kings, and 
 believes that kings reign by divine right, as Charles the 
 First believed, until our people taught him something else. 
 
 When Bismarck, by a jealous war against France, 
 built up the group of small German states into a united 
 nation, with the King of Prussia at their head, his idea 
 was that Germany should be the strongest nation in 
 Europe; and he made it so. 
 
 He did not mean that Germany should have an empire ; 
 he wanted her to be all-powerful in Europe, and he raised 
 her to the dignity and power which the Emperor William 
 found ready-made for him when he succeeded to the 
 throne. But the young Emperor was ambitious; he 
 must have an empire like England's. It was not enough 
 that he should be strong in Europe ; he must dominate the 
 world and have all things under his feet. That was the 
 spirit in which the German Emperor came to the throne,
 
 THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 205 
 
 the spirit in which he dismissed his Chancellor, Bismarck, 
 perfected his army, and built up his navy. Many splendid 
 things the German nation has done, and much we in 
 England have learned from it ; but the Emperor has been 
 the War-Lord all the time, and has called upon God to 
 defend his sword as if he were a Galahad whose heart was 
 pure. 
 
 And so the German people have allowed themselves to 
 believe that a great German Empire was arising which 
 must be defended from some jealous foe, and that Britain 
 was the enemy. It is a monstrous falsehood. The war 
 has been made by Germany against her friendly neighbours. 
 
 It has began in dishonour and deceit. It has nothing 
 to do with the murder of the Crown Prince of Austria 
 a crime plotted in Serbia which Austria could have easily 
 avenged without disturbing Europe for an hour. But 
 Austria took Germany into her confidence after that foul 
 crime, and together they drew up a list of demands on 
 Serbia which no self-respecting nation could accept; and 
 more than this was done, for Austria mobilised an army 
 strong enough to punish Serbia ten times over. It was as 
 if six strong men should fight a boy. Serbia has not had 
 much self-respect, but that is no reason why a small 
 nation should be crushed by a big bully, and Russia stood 
 by Serbia, as she is bound to do in honour to the Slav race, 
 which she protects for the sake of the great host of Slavs 
 over whom she rules. It was clear that Russia would not 
 let Serbia be crushed ; and it can only have been intended 
 to humble Russia by treating Serbia offensively. 
 
 Nations do not submit to insults wilfully flung at them, 
 and Russia stood by Serbia. She mobilised her army. 
 That was the only possible effect of Austria's mobilising,
 
 206 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 and it was expected. Germany is Austria's ally, and these 
 two nations, with Italy, form the Triple Alliance. Ger- 
 many and Austria were, therefore, united against Russia, 
 and it was expected that Italy would join them. But Italy 
 remembers Garibaldi, and her people have not lost their 
 love of freedom. The Triple Alliance exists for self-defence, 
 and not for attack on peaceful nations, and Italy refused 
 to help the German nations in an expedition which was 
 more like housebreaking than ordinary war. 
 
 Now there happened a disgraceful thing. The German 
 Emperor, for many days, pretended to be on the side of 
 peace, and sent letters and telegrams to the Tsar of Russia 
 begging him, like a loving brother, not to plunge Europe 
 into war. It was the hand of Esau and the voice of Jacob ; 
 the Emperor was deceiving Russia and all Europe in order 
 that he might get a good start in the war he was really 
 provoking. The German Emperor talked of peace until 
 he was prepared for war, and then he aimed a vital blow at 
 France ! 
 
 France had done nothing, but the German Emperor 
 hated her, and perhaps feared her a little for the splendid 
 way in which she recovered from the shock of 1870, when 
 Germany, after defeating her, took from her two provinces 
 and 200,000,000. 
 
 It was a cruel and ungenerous ending of a war, as if a 
 man should kick another when he is stricken down, and 
 France has ever since mourned her lost provinces of 
 Alsace and Lorraine, and yearned to have them back. 
 But France was at peace, and had no thought of war when 
 the Kaiser turned to rend her, and it is as certain as any- 
 thing on earth can ever be that France would never have 
 gone to war except in self-defence.
 
 THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 207 
 
 The sudden blow at France, like the flash of a dagger 
 in the dark, was a challenge to the peace of Europe. It 
 meant that Germany intended to cripple France and make 
 her own position more powerful still. A soldier-ruled 
 nation was to enrich herself at the expense of a free republic, 
 our neighbour and friend. France is allied to Russia, 
 and instantly Russia ranged herself on France's side. 
 
 And now, what should England do ? We were friendly 
 with France, but were free to do the thing we would : to 
 remain at peace and look on at the murder of France 
 which had been taken by surprise, and was not ready 
 or to stand by free France and drive the German army 
 back. That was the problem we had to decide, and while 
 England was deciding the German Emperor did a thing 
 which compelled England to act at once or lose her good 
 name for ever. He offered a bribe to England to betray her 
 friend. 
 
 This is how it came about. The frontier of France 
 and Germany is not very long; the two countries touch 
 for about 180 miles, and the French have guarded the 
 frontier with strong fortifications. But there are two 
 points not so strongly guarded, at which Germany might 
 enter France the point where France touches the little 
 kingdom of Luxemburg, and the line dividing France and 
 Belgium. The German Emperor, with his armed soldiers, 
 broke into the Duchy of Luxemburg, and then asked the 
 King of the Belgians to allow his army to pass through 
 Belgium to attack France. 
 
 Now, England and France and Germany and other 
 Powers had pledged themselves solemnly to protect 
 Belgium against all attacks, and not to invade her territory 
 under any circumstances, and the King of the Belgians
 
 208 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 reminded the German Emperor of this sacred pledge. The 
 German Emperor's reply was that he would go to war with 
 Belgium if the King would not let him pass through. It 
 was the answer a brigand would have given. Belgium 
 thereupon appealed to England to save her, in fulfilment 
 of her solemn promise, and we should have broken our 
 national word if we had refused. No great nation could 
 refuse such an appeal without losing its honour, and while 
 England was preparing her answer to Belgium another 
 proposal was made by the German Emperor, such as one 
 highway robber might make to another. 
 
 It is too sordid to believe, and a member of the 
 Government told the House of Lords that if one man had 
 made the proposal to another in private life, the man to 
 whom it was made must surely have knocked the proposer 
 down. The proposal was that if England would betray 
 France who trusted her and not object to Germany's 
 attack on her, Germany would promise not to take any 
 French territory in Europe, but would be satisfied with 
 taking her colonial empire* That is to say, England was to 
 break her pledge to Belgium, to betray France, and to let 
 Germany steal the French colonies for what ? For a 
 promise that Germany would not steal land in Europe ! 
 
 There was, happily, at the head of our foreign affairs 
 at this time, a man who is respected throughout the world, 
 Sir Edward Grey, and he had no misgiving in the face of 
 this attempt to buy our national honour. He replied that 
 England did not bargain in that way. He sent an ulti- 
 matum, also, to Germany, demanding that she should keep 
 her pledge to Belgium, giving her twenty -four hours to be 
 true to her word. The German Emperor, his honour 
 sullied by an act of treachery in the eyes of all the world,
 
 * * , "Ti 
 
 tf&&!SK 
 
 SHAKESPEARE CREEPS LIKE A SNAIL UNWILLINGLY TO SCHOOL 
 
 [S CAa/Xer 10
 
 THROUGH OUR ENGLISH WOODLANDS LONG AGO THERE WALKED A BOY OF STRATFORD. 
 DRINKING IN THE SCENES OF WONDER 
 
 IS ft Chattier 10
 
 BELIEVING JULIET DEAD, ROMEO BUYS POISON FOR HIMSELF FROM THE POOR 
 
 APOTHECARY
 
 ONE OF THE MOST PATHETIC SCENES IN SHAKESPEARE-ARTHUR'S APPEAL TO HUBERT 
 
 " Will you put out mine eyes these eyes that never did, nor never shall, 
 so much as frown on you ? " 
 
 From the painting by Mr. W. F. Yeames. R.A.. now hanging in iht MancHeiler Art Galley
 
 THE DARK HOUR OF EUROPE 209 
 
 was not jealous of his plighted word, and refused to keep 
 his vow to the little nation which stood in the way of his 
 schemes. 
 
 So it came about that at eleven o'clock on the night of 
 August 4, 1914, the Island declared war with Germany, 
 and went out into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 
 
 But she will come back. She goes out with clean 
 hands to uphold her own honour, the freedom of France, 
 and the independence of Belgium. She goes out against 
 an Emperor who has broken his word and attacked three 
 peaceful countries for nothing but the love of power. 
 
 And she goes out because, if the German Emperor 
 were to have his way, France would be broken, Belgium 
 would be joined to Germany, the militarism of Germany 
 would be brought to the shores of the North Sea, within 
 reach of our own coasts, and the Island would cease to be 
 free. We should not be at peace for a single day, but 
 should be threatened by the restless ambition of this over- 
 weening man, in \vhose sight a nation is nothing if it stands 
 in his way, in whose hands a million men are only food for 
 powder. 
 
 There will be dark days for us, and dark years to come ; 
 and no man can say what the world will be like when 
 we have slept another hundred nights. The Island 
 is united, and she goes out to her great sacrifice with a 
 people sound and true at heart, with her soul unsullied 
 before God, with her solemn word unbroken before man, 
 with no cause to seek but the freedom of Europe, with no 
 aim to serve but the right of nations to be free. Not once 
 nor twice, but many times, in our fair Island story, England, 
 our England, has driven back the enemy of mankind, and 
 the Right that is Might will not fail the world now.
 
 210 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 We have great allies. Our friends are the spirit of 
 freedom that has built up France, the unconquerable 
 Belgian sons of the heroes Caesar found in Gaul, the love 
 of truth that is set deep in the heart of our Island Home. 
 We shall go down in the Shadow, and our heroes will die 
 for us, but we shall rise again with the rising of the sun, 
 and we, and all the free peoples who are with us, shall pass 
 through the fires and be justified, worthy before man and 
 guiltless before God.
 
 THE GERMAN EMPEROR WALKS OUT OF 
 CIVILISATION 
 
 October 1914 
 
 THE ruler of one of the greatest nations is abandoning 
 his honour, his love of doing right, his common humanity. 
 The Kaiser has fallen to the level of a brigand. 
 
 It is right that that should be said. It is right that 
 we should cease to honour a man who sends out ruthless 
 butchers to slay innocent people and destroy their towns. 
 It is right that we should brand as a criminal a man who, 
 for no reason at all, shatters to fragments the most beautiful 
 buildings that come within range of his monstrous guns. 
 
 It is difficult to be calm while Rheims Cathedral is 
 burning. It is difficult to remember that the German 
 people are civilised while their armies are murdering women 
 and children. There have been wars before, great wars; 
 there have been kings before, bad kings; but no war was 
 ever more savagely conducted than the war that Germany 
 is making on two innocent nations, and no king has ever 
 sunk so low in a few short weeks as this Hohenzollern. 
 
 Not a free State stands in the world today that would 
 take the word of this proud monarch who stood so high 
 but a few months ago; not a shopkeeper in Europe, 
 perhaps, outside the German Empire, who would take a 
 German cheque. It is the beginning of the end of a great 
 
 nation which trusted a man who has betrayed it. 
 
 211
 
 212 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 The end will not be yet, but come it must. There is 
 no room in a free Europe for the Armed Anarchy of Prussia, 
 and either Prussia must go down and lose for ever the power 
 it has turned against humanity, or humanity must go 
 down and be for ever under Prussia's heel. Germany is 
 no longer at war against a few nations only ; she is at war 
 against civilisation ; she is making war on the past and the 
 present and the future. She has chosen the path of the 
 barbarian, and the question that is to be answered now is 
 whether there shall be set up in the very heart of Europe a 
 powerful State which knows no law, which believes that 
 Might is Right, which is ready to hack its way through 
 any peaceful land that dares to be free. 
 
 That is the question which is being answered now on 
 the banks of the rivers of France, and every man out- 
 side Germany knows what the answer must be. The 
 answer is that Freedom never will be crushed while the 
 sun shines in the heavens. The answer is that France will 
 be a wilderness, that these islands will be below the level 
 of the sea, before the King of Prussia rides down Whitehall 
 once again. 
 
 We may be sure as sure as we may be of anything in 
 a world where an emperor can lie and his drunken officers 
 can burn down cathedrals that our armies are fighting 
 the last great war in Europe. It can never be again. 
 The end of it must be to make an end of war, and give peace 
 for ever to the four hundred million people of Europe. 
 And the German Emperor, whose attack on the free nations 
 has failed, knows that. He has played his stroke for the 
 mastery of the world ; he has sought to trample down the 
 people of other lands as he tramples down the people of 
 his own Prussian provinces. How dare these Frenchmen
 
 EMPEROR WALKS OUT OF CIVILISATION 213 
 
 and Belgian men and Englishmen mock at his Highness 
 when the Prussian men and the Saxe Weimar men and the 
 Potsdam men fall down and worship him ? Well, it is not 
 the way of our free people to worship the gods made in 
 Germany, and the German Emperor, for the first time in 
 his life, has tested the metal of men who will not put their 
 head under his heel. 
 
 And so, maddened by his failure, the new Attila will 
 leave his mark on Europe before he is cast out of it, and 
 it will be a red mark, too. He will take revenge of civilisa- 
 tion ; he will blot out of the world the glorious things that 
 mock his Potsdam royalness; he will gain a reputation 
 like the Huns, and leave in his path a ruin so red that the 
 stain shall never be wiped out as long as history endures. 
 
 It is the bitter tragedy of these fearful days that this 
 dishonoured man guarded by thousands of troops and a 
 fleet of aeroplanes is still at the head of an armed host 
 that only brute force can stop in its work of fire and murder, 
 and Europe will pass through unknown terrors before his 
 power is broken. 
 
 But broken it will be. It shall not profit a man if he 
 gain the whole world and lose his own soul, and the German 
 Emperor has not even gained the world. Time will deal 
 with him, and those of us who live to see the Better Days 
 will look up at the stars in their courses and seem to hear 
 them saying, Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right ?
 
 THE KAISER HOISTS THE PIRATE'S FLAG 
 
 THE eyes of men have looked upon strange scenes . They 
 have seen nations rise from lowly obscurity to the height 
 of power. They have seen an ancient empire put off the 
 cloak it has worn a thousand years, set aside the relics of 
 a dim barbaric age, and take its place among the Great 
 Powers of the earth. They have seen the decline of bar- 
 barism and the rise of civilisation everywhere. 
 
 And now, for the first time since tribes of wild men 
 ceased to eat each other and formed themselves into 
 nations, the eyes of men have looked upon another thing. 
 They have seen a nation pass out of civilisation by its own 
 choice, of its own free will. 
 
 The German Emperor, the assassin of one nation, is 
 leading another his own out of the pale of our common 
 humanity. Germany, the homeland of Goethe, the land 
 from which the English came, has hoisted the pirate's 
 flag upon the seas. She has declared that she will no 
 longer accept the laws that hold together the civilised 
 communities of the world. 
 
 Thwarted in her attempt to destroy France and 
 Russia as she has destroyed Belgium, Germany sees the 
 failure of the long preparations of forty years. The war 
 machine has broken down, as all things must break down 
 that aim against the liberty of the human race. At the 
 
 214
 
 THE KAISER HOISTS THE PIRATE'S FLAG 215 
 
 end of six months of war, instead of holding her head high 
 as a conqueror, Germany is stricken low. Her ships have 
 disappeared from all the seas; they lie at the bottom or 
 are imprisoned in harbours which they dare not leave. 
 And so Germany, cut off from the world, unable to get the 
 raw materials she needs from other countries, is in the 
 position in which she herself placed Paris in 1871, when 
 people kept themselves alive by eating rats and dogs. 
 
 But what, then, we may ask, is the great German 
 Fleet doing ? The answer is that it has failed the Germans 
 who have built it at a cost of three hundred million pounds, 
 and it is hiding in the Kiel Canal, behind mines. 
 
 It has not been entirely idle, for now and then a few 
 fast cruisers have come out bravely into the open sea, and, 
 in defiance of the written law of nations, agreed to by 
 Germany itself, has fired on unprotected towns and 
 murdered women and children in their beds at night. But 
 once too often these pirate ships have stolen out, and the 
 bottom of the North Sea is strewn with the wreckage and 
 the dead. The German Fleet is hiding from the British 
 Fleet because it has no hope of meeting it and remaining 
 on the surface of the waters. 
 
 So that the German Navy is as if it were not there, 
 and its helplessness is driving the German Emperor to 
 desperation. The laws of war, agreed upon by all the 
 nations, give Germany a means of starving out her enemies. 
 She may sink any enemy ship she pleases; only if she 
 sinks a merchant ship, unarmed and unable to defend 
 itself, she must save the crew. She may even stop a 
 neutral ship if she can catch it on its way to England with 
 military supplies, and arrest the ship and capture its 
 supplies; but she must not hurt the hair of a neutral
 
 216 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 person's head. Therefore, she must make sure of the 
 nature of all ships, and in certain cases she must save the 
 crews before she fires. If Germany can do that, it is her 
 right, and nobody will complain. 
 
 But Germany cannot do it. She dare not bring her 
 ships out in the open, because they love the rippling 
 surface of the sea better than the muddy bottom. And 
 so the Power which murdered the little nation she had 
 promised to protect has thought out another plan. If she 
 cannot play the game according to the rules, she will tear 
 up the rules and play the game without them. That is 
 the German way when Germany is beaten. If she cannot 
 win by fair means, she will try by foul. If she cannot get 
 to Paris, she will burn down Rlieims Cathedral. And, 
 as she dare not bring out her big ships to cut off supplies 
 from England, she will bring up her submarines and make 
 war with them. It is this that has stirred the world as it 
 has rarely been stirred before, for this proposition, seeming 
 so simple, is the German way out of the civilised world. 
 
 There is no objection to Germany using her submarines, 
 only she must keep the rules, and the submarine cannot keep 
 the rules. There is no objection to playing cricket, only 
 one side must not bowl with a bomb for a ball. We must 
 play the game and keep the rules, and the submarine can 
 do neither, because it must make haste to be gone, and 
 cannot wait to make sure of its ship ; and it has no means 
 of saving the lives of the crews. Therefore, the only way 
 in which the submarine can cut off supplies is to break all 
 the rules and sink every ship at sight, whoever it belongs 
 to, whatever its business is, and whatever happens to the 
 people on board. When a British ship captures a German 
 ship, it saves the life of every man on board ; Germany
 
 THE KAISER HOISTS THE PIRATE'S FLAG 217 
 
 proposes to sink the ship and drown the men. It is war 
 on every ship at sea, war not against a nation but against 
 humanity. It is going back to the days of pirates. 
 
 Great Britain is not afraid of this policy of murder on 
 the high seas ; she is not afraid of anything that Germany 
 in or out of her senses can do. But from the days of Nelson 
 she has held the highways of the ocean and kept them 
 free for all who would use them in honour and peace. 
 It is her service to the world to keep the oceans free, and 
 her power has made the sea a uniter instead of a divider 
 of nations. And therefore it is her duty now, at any cost, 
 to fight the pirates and destroy this danger to mankind. 
 
 There is no safety on the seas if the new pirates are 
 to have their way, and already the American Government, 
 which has remained silent in the face of so many crimes 
 rather than widen the area of the war, has been stirred to its 
 depths. The world is in the presence of a nation which, 
 beaten to desperation, has revenged itself by adopting a 
 policy of murder at sight; and we know that the path 
 she has laid down for herself Germany will pursue. No 
 thought of humanity has held her back since the war 
 began. There has been nothing in history more horrible 
 to read than the story of what Germany has done in these 
 six months ; and now she is turning pirate too. 
 
 Well, the spirit of the world will not break, the power 
 of the free nations is not exhausted, the means for dealing 
 with a pirate even with the might of Germany behind 
 him are not beyond the resources of mankind. We shall 
 lose some ships, which we can spare; we shall lose some 
 men, whom we shall mourn; and the neutral world will 
 lose ships and men too. We shall not be able to reply 
 in the usual way, by attacking Germany with our own
 
 218 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 submarines, because there are no German ships to attack; 
 and, though German submarines can steal from their 
 hiding into the open sea, our submarines will not run from 
 the open sea into the enemy's cage. 
 
 But a few boats hidden in the North Sea will not change 
 the destiny of the world, will not alter the course of the 
 war, will not make one British seaman flinch. There is 
 not a boy on a British ship whose spirit will not stiffen at 
 the thought that the pirates are after him. 
 
 We sailed wherever ship could sail, 
 We founded many a mighty state; 
 Pray God our greatness may not fail 
 Through craven fears of being great. 
 
 Our greatness will not fail. In this dark day, when 
 once again this realm, this England, must lead the world 
 against a common foe, the glory of the ages past is as 
 nothing to the glory that the eye of faith can see. We 
 must have faith and believe. We must lift up our hearts; 
 we must be strong and of good courage ; we must remember, 
 whatever may come, that no power exists on earth that 
 can conquer liberty.
 
 THE WILD BEAST BREAKS LOOSE 
 
 July 1915 
 
 TERRIBLE it has been to see the break-up of a powerful 
 nation; a bitter thing it is to see the German people 
 become the outcasts of the world. 
 
 When the whole story of these days is written it will 
 be proved to all the world that the influence of Germany 
 for a generation has been leading up to what Lord Tenny- 
 son called " Red ruin and the breaking up of laws." A 
 free nation is possible because law defends what is right 
 against what is wrong, and a free Europe is possible because 
 the nations of Europe have agreed upon certain public 
 laws and promised to defend them whatever happens. 
 Germany promised, but she has not kept her word. 
 
 All the world knows now, too well, this German scorn 
 of public law ; but all the world does not, perhaps, quite 
 realise the depths to which the Germans have descended 
 in their attempts to rule the earth. It was not enough 
 that she should break all public law and threaten to make 
 war if any should defend it ; it was not enough that her 
 spies should be at work in every land ; it was not enough 
 that she should look on her treaties as scraps of paper, 
 that she should break her word and falsify despatches 
 and hold back truth when it should serve her purpose. 
 One deeper depth than this the German Government can 
 reach. 
 
 219
 
 220 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 All nations have ambassadors at the Courts of all Great 
 Powers. The British Ambassador in Berlin represented 
 King George and the German Ambassador in London 
 represented the Kaiser until the war broke out, when 
 both ambassadors were withdrawn. But the German 
 ambassadors remain, of course, in neutral countries ; the 
 presence of an ambassador is the accepted sign of one 
 country's friendliness towards another. 
 
 Now, it is essential to the security and peace of nations 
 that there should be perfect trust between an ambassador 
 and the nation in which he represents his Government; 
 and it is the first rule of an ambassador's code of honour 
 that he should be loyal to the country to which he goes. 
 He must not interfere in its internal affairs; he must do 
 nothing hostile to its interests as long as he enjoys its 
 hospitality. Let us see how Germany has carried out this 
 code of honour. We know how she behaves in war; she 
 sent the French Ambassador home as if he were a criminal, 
 and for half an hour he sat in a train with a German soldier 
 aiming a loaded pistol at his head. That is the spirit in 
 which Berlin began the war. But let us see their spirit 
 at work in two countries with which Germany was still 
 at peace America and Italy. 
 
 In America the German Ambassador, in defiance of 
 a sacred code of honour, approached the American people 
 direct, behind the backs of their Government, and 
 advertised in their newspapers that the Lusitania, with 
 all its American citizens on board, would be sunk if it 
 dared to sail to England in other words, that the German 
 Government was to murder American citizens. He then 
 took part in a plot to drown these American citizens, 
 against all the laws of war, and the plot was carried out.
 
 THE WILD BEAST BREAKS LOOSE 221 
 
 They were drowned in one of the noblest works of 
 man that ever sailed the seas, a glorious thing to look 
 upon, packed with all the wonder that science could put 
 into it, the fruit of years of human toil, and one of the 
 strongest links in that chain of travel that has wound 
 itself round the earth and helped to make all peoples one. 
 Well, this Lusitania lies at the bottom of the sea, sunk 
 by the German Government, deliberately and of evil 
 purpose, and 1100 men and women, children and babies, 
 lie there with her. They were drowned by the will of 
 the German Emperor. 
 
 That was in America. In Italy the German Ambas- 
 sador, behind the backs of the Italian Government, 
 communicated false information to members of the Italian 
 Parliament in order to prejudice the position of the King's 
 Ministers. While pretending to negotiate with the 
 Government, the German Ambassador was conspiring, 
 in the very heart of Rome itself, against the interests of 
 the Italian nation. 
 
 The American plot, most unhappily, succeeded; the 
 Italian plot, most happily, failed. Public anger across 
 the Atlantic knew no bounds, and there were loud demands 
 that the dishonoured ambassador should be given his 
 passport home. President Wilson, whose restraint has 
 been one of the most astonishing things of these terrible 
 days, sent to the German Emperor an earnest protest, 
 and an urgent demand for reparation, and the chief 
 advertising agent of the German Government in America 
 has had to leave the country. 
 
 Whether the outcry of the American people will lead 
 them to war against the assassins of the Lusitania remains 
 to be seen, but this act of public murder has outlawed the
 
 222 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 German nation from America and the rest of the world. 
 In Italy the revelation of Germany's dishonour has kindled 
 into flame the smouldering fires of indignation, and the 
 land of Garibaldi is at last where Garibaldi would have 
 had it long ago on the side of a peaceful world against 
 the blood-stained Government of Berlin. 
 
 At home, and throughout the British Empire, and 
 beyond the borders of the Empire where the flags of the 
 Allies fly, the wrath of the people has broken all its bounds, 
 and there have been great risings against the German race. 
 Men who are only human cannot restrain themselves in 
 the presence of wild beasts loose, and, as a great American 
 paper said, there is a wild beast loose in the world. It 
 is not surprising, therefore, however regrettable it is, that 
 there have been risings against German subjects and 
 damage to property, so that in the end our Government 
 at home has had to intern all Austrians and Germans of 
 fighting age, and send to their own countries Austrians 
 and Germans not of fighting age. The King has taken 
 down the German banners which hung over the graves of 
 the Kings of England in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, 
 and has cast out from the Order of the Garter, the oldest 
 Order of Chivalry in the world, the Kaiser and seven 
 German princes as we cast out that traitor Prince 
 Albert, our own Prince Christian's son, who, born and 
 bred in the Island, fed by the hands of our people, kept 
 by the sweat of their brow, left our King's household in 
 these dark days to fight against the Island with the 
 enemies of our race. 
 
 Meanwhile the fighting goes on, in France, in Belgium, 
 in Africa, and in the Dardanelles ; and the barbarism which 
 has been forced on all the armies runs wild in Europe.
 
 THE WILD BEAST BREAKS LOOSE 223 
 
 Men fight now not with guns only, but with poisonous 
 gases that choke a man and take his breath away, and the 
 heart of the British people has been stricken by the 
 terrible necessity that lies upon them to meet this German 
 weapon in the only way in which it can be met. A hundred 
 years ago this horrible form of warfare was secretly 
 proposed in England and secretly rejected by the British 
 Government as inhuman; but time has passed, and the 
 German Army, unable to win by fair means, has sought 
 to win by foul. Our brave men have been choked to 
 death, and must continue to be choked to death unless 
 they, too, have this poison gas at their disposal; and so 
 the poison gas they have. 
 
 It is the only way. We must fight brute force with 
 brute force; we cannot stand and argue while the tiger 
 springs. There can be no pause while the wild beast is 
 yet loose, and we can only pray that the day that is surely 
 coming will be hastened. No international Parliament is 
 there yet, but there is an international humanity, and it 
 knows no bounds. There is no force on earth can stop it 
 in the end. The spirit of man that is stronger than steel 
 will sweep for ever from the earth this thing that makes 
 us shudder now. 
 
 Still we must lift up our hearts, still we must keep 
 calm and strong, and through the darkness, beyond the 
 night, the Light of Dawn will break.
 
 All splendid deeds are caught into the sky 
 And set to light the Ages. 
 
 FOR ages yet unborn the path that men tread through 
 this world will be lit up by the glory of Gallipoli. The 
 British flag is there no more, but a fire has been kindled 
 there that will not die down. 
 
 There never was a nobler story in the annals of our race. 
 We need not hide the fact that one great enterprise has 
 failed. We need not be ashamed of tears as we think of 
 thirty thousand glorious men who fell in these ravines 
 and on the mountain slopes, and sleep there now amid 
 " the silence that is in the lonely hills." But there is no 
 room for despair in this great story. There is room for 
 hope and faith and trust, for a quickening of the heart 
 that stirs with love of liberty and the soul that is on fire 
 in this great cause of all mankind. 
 
 For the story of Gallipoli is the story of men who dared 
 an " impossible " thing, and nearly did it. They dared a 
 thing which those who knew said never could be done, 
 and only an accident and a tragedy stayed them from 
 doing it. 
 
 The accident was that a general lost his way in the dark ; 
 the tragedy was that at a critical moment in the history of 
 the Island we could not spare a hundred thousand men. 
 
 224
 
 TOUCHSTONE THE MERRY COMPANION OF ROSALIND AND CELIA, IN THE FOREST OF 
 
 ARDEN 
 
 \SetChaptcr 10
 
 THE MERRY-HEARTED AUTOLYCUS. THE SNAPPER-UP OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES. OFFERS 
 
 HIS WARES 
 
 {See Chapter 10 
 
 CHRISTOPHER SLY. THE LITTLE TINKER, WAKES UP IN A STRANGE BED 
 
 (See Chapter 10
 
 Early on the morning of August 9, 1915, when most of 
 us were sleeping safely in our beds, we won for a moment 
 the crowning height that overlooks the Dardanelles. 
 Fearless little Gurkhas from India and sturdy lads from 
 Lancashire dashed side by side up the slopes of Sari Bair 
 and looked down on the Narrows. They saw the little 
 British vessels that seemed likely so soon to go through. 
 They stood there a moment and looked out from Europe 
 into Asia, and then they ran forward down the crest on 
 the other side, the crown of glory in their grasp, the im- 
 possible accomplished. The Turk was flying before them. 
 The war might soon be over. 
 
 But at that moment there was happening one of the 
 saddest things in the story of the world. A British column 
 was groping its way in the dark and got lost, and in losing 
 its way it lost Constantinople for the Allies. There can 
 be hardly any doubt of that. The fate of that dazzling 
 city of the East, the hope of many an army in ages past, 
 was changed in not many minutes, and these minutes, we 
 may be sure, added many bitter months and many thousand 
 deaths to the Great War. 
 
 The plan for that great day was that our troops should 
 storm the height of Sari Bair and be reinforced by General 
 Baldwin's column. Infinite pains had been taken, and 
 the arrangements were perfect. There were guides along 
 the narrow track which led to victory, and General Bald- 
 win's column had only to find the way. But to find your 
 way in Gallipoli in the dark, through country in which you 
 have never been before, is to find your way in a maze, and, 
 in spite of all precautions, the darkness, the rough country, 
 the sheer steepness, delayed the advancing column. " In 
 plain English," says the official despatch, " Baldwin,
 
 226 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 owing to the darkness and the awful country, lost his way, 
 through no fault of his own. 
 
 " So, at the supreme moment, when the Gurkhas and 
 Lancashire men were on the crest, Baldwin's column was 
 still a long way off, and, instead of reinforcements, there 
 came upon our men a burst of heavy shell. The men were 
 thrown into confusion by events so unexpected, and the 
 Turkish commander saw his chance. He rallied his fleeing 
 troops and turned them round, and the brave British 
 troops, who had seen the Promised Land and had seemed 
 for a moment to have held victory in their grasp, were 
 forced backwards over the crest." 
 
 " But where was the main attack where was Bald- 
 win ? " asks the official despatch, and it goes on to tell us 
 that, when that bold but unlucky commander found he 
 could not possibly reach our trenches in time, he deployed 
 for attack where he stood. Now his men were coming on 
 in fine style, and, as the Turks topped the ridge with shouts 
 of joy, the East Lancashire men and Hampshire men were 
 charging up on our side of the slope. But it was too late. 
 The Turks were at the crest again in overwhelming 
 numbers, and the day was lost, the Narrows were lost, and 
 Constantinople was lost. 
 
 Let us close this sad chapter with these words from 
 the next day's story : " By evening the casualties had 
 reached 12,000 ; ten commanding officers out of thirteen 
 had disappeared from the fighting effectives ; the Warwicks 
 and the Worcesters had lost literally every single officer." 
 Baldwin was gone, and all his staff. 
 
 That was the accident by which we lost the Promised 
 Land. Now there came a tragedy. The hope of storming 
 the height was not yet gone, and within a week after
 
 MOST THRILLING MOMENT OF THE WAR 227 
 
 Baldwin lost his way Sir Ian Hamilton, who was in com- 
 mand, had made up his mind that we could go through. 
 
 The Turks had strengthened their positions ; they had 
 more men than we had ; they had plenty of ammunition, 
 plenty of reinforcements, and they held all the points of 
 vantage. Still the British general kept his heart. He still 
 believed in his men if only he could get them. 
 
 He sent home a long cable, and one day in the middle 
 of last August his desperate appeal arrived at the War 
 Office in London. Autumn was already upon us, and if 
 the campaign was to be brought to a quick, victorious 
 decision large reinforcements must be sent at once. His 
 British divisions were 45,000 short, and some of his fine 
 battalions had dwindled down so far that he had to with- 
 draw them from the fighting line. It was vital to replenish 
 these sadly broken ranks, and when that was done he 
 wanted 50,000 more. If he could get these 95,000 men it 
 seemed to him humanly certain that we could get through ; 
 that " if this help could be sent at once we could still clear 
 a passage for our fleet to Constantinople." 
 
 Always in war the cry is for men. We remember the 
 answer of Sir John French at Mons : "I have sent you all 
 the reinforcements that I can. You can have my two 
 sentries and my headquarters staff." 
 
 We remember the cry of Westmoreland at Agincourt : 
 
 O that we now had here 
 
 But one ten thousand of those men in England 
 
 That do no work today ! 
 
 And those of us who have read The Dynasts, Mr. Thomas 
 Hardy's dramatic poem of the Napoleonic Wars, remember 
 the great scenes when the appeals come to Napoleon and
 
 228 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Wellington for reinforcements to save the day. The 
 messenger comes riding up to Napoleon, blood-stained, 
 muddy, and breathless, and says : 
 
 The Prince of Moscow, sire, the Marshal Ney, 
 Bids me implore that infantry be sent 
 Immediately, to further his attack. 
 They cannot be dispensed with, save we fail ! 
 
 And then Napoleon, in anger : 
 
 Infantry ! Where the sacred God thinks he 
 I can find infantry for him ? Forsooth, 
 Does he expect me to create them eh ? 
 
 The trembling messenger can but deliver his com- 
 mission, but he has seen how France must fail 
 
 Without such backing. . . . Our cavalry 
 
 Lie stretched in swathes, fronting the furnace -throats 
 
 Of the English cannon as a breastwork built 
 
 Of reeking corpses. Marshal Ney's third horse 
 
 Is shot. . . . But I see, 
 
 Likewise, that I can claim no reinforcement, 
 
 And will return and say so. 
 
 " Life's curse begins, I see, with helplessness," says 
 Napoleon, when the messenger has gone. He fain would 
 strengthen Soult : 
 
 Within an ace 
 
 Of breaking down the English as he is, 
 'T would write upon the sunset " Victory ! " 
 
 On the other side of the field a messenger for rein- 
 forcements is riding up. " Reinforcements ! " shrieks 
 Wellington : 
 
 And where am I to get him reinforcements 
 
 In Heaven's name ? I've no reinforcements here.
 
 MOST THRILLING MOMENT OF THE WAR 229 
 
 MESSENGER : What's to be done, your Grace ? 
 WELLINGTON : Done ? Those he has left him, be they 
 
 many or few, 
 Fight till they fall, like others in the field. 
 
 Once again, as at Agincourt, as at Waterloo, as at Mons, 
 the famine in men was a thing to break men's hearts. 
 The answer that went back to Gallipoli from the War Office 
 was that the men could not be sent, and the end of it is 
 that the men who were there, though each fought with the 
 strength of ten, could do no more, and today Gallipoli is 
 silent. 
 
 We had not the men, and without the men we could not 
 win, but the men who were there and the things they did 
 will live for ever in the history of freedom. 
 
 There was no such word as Anzac a year ago, but now 
 it will not die. It will live on the maps of Gallipoli; it 
 will live in history with the story of Horatius and Thermo- 
 pylae; should it not live in geography as the name of 
 Australia's new capital? What book of Golden Deeds 
 can ever again be published without this tale of Anzac 
 told by Sir Ian Hamilton in this wonderful despatch : 
 
 In the course of the fight there happened a very mysteri- 
 ous thing. The l/5th Norfolks found themselves for a 
 moment less strongly opposed than the rest of the brigade. 
 
 Against the yielding forces of the enemy, Colonel Sir H. 
 Beauchamp, a bold, self-confident officer, eagerly pressed 
 forward, followed by the best part of the battalion. The 
 fighting grew hotter, and the ground became more wooded 
 and broken. At this stage many men were wounded or 
 grew exhausted with thirst. These found their way back 
 to camp during the night. But the colonel, with 16 
 officers and 250 men, still kept pushing on, driving the 
 enemy before him. Among these ardent souls was part
 
 230 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 of a fine company from the King's Sandringham estates. 
 Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of them. They 
 charged into the forest, and were lost to sight or sound. Not 
 one of them ever came back. 
 
 Side by side with the Anzacs the men of the Australian 
 and New Zealand Army Corps were men of the new 
 British army, and Sir Ian Hamilton, who has seen war at 
 its best and worst, was thrilled with pride as he watched 
 the advance of these yeomen. 
 
 There is usually some sort of cover for the bringing up 
 of reserves in war, but here, for a mile and a half, there 
 was nothing to conceal a mouse as these men of England 
 came up to live or to die, and the commander writes that, 
 despite the critical events in other parts of the field, he 
 could hardly take his glasses from these men. " They 
 moved like men marching on parade. Here and there a 
 shell would take toll of a cluster; there they lay. There 
 was no straggling; the others moved steadily on. Not 
 a man was there who hung back or hurried." 
 
 Men were brothers there, comrades every one. British 
 generals fought in the ranks, and men dropped all those 
 instruments of war that science has put into an army's 
 hands, and fought as men fought in the Age of Stone. 
 They caught one another by the throat in so desperate a 
 battle that Sir Ian Hamilton, with all his power of words, 
 cannot describe it. Again and again, he says, the Turks 
 came on, fighting magnificently and calling upon the name 
 of God, and our men stood to it, and with many a deed of 
 daring maintained the old traditions of their race. It was 
 the end of four days' fighting against great odds, but there 
 was no flinching. Our men died where they stood. 
 
 Such things were done with the men who were there :
 
 MOST THRILLING MOMENT OF THE WAR 231 
 
 what might not have been done with but one half of the 
 hundred thousand for whom Gallipoli had cried in vain ? 
 We do not know. But for those who were there remains 
 the consolation that Shakespeare gives them : " The 
 fewer men the greater share of honour." From both 
 sides of the earth they came, and through the eternal 
 years their fame will ring. They held the flag of freedom 
 high, and while England lives they will not die.
 
 THE SIGHT OF THE ISLAND FIGHTING 
 FOR ITS LIFE 
 
 December 1917 
 
 I FOUND myself on the Field of Agincourt, between 
 those little woods where Harry of England camped on 
 that great eve of Crispin's Day, and went about among 
 his brave ten thousand men, 
 
 Bade them good-morrow with a modest smile, 
 And called them brothers, friends, and countrymen. 
 
 I went the way King Harry went five centuries ago, and as 
 we sped through these fields of France the picture of those 
 days and these seemed blended into one, for once again, 
 
 Now all the youth of England are on fire, 
 And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies ; 
 Now thrive the armourers, and honour's thought 
 Reigns solely in the breast of every man. 
 
 For we were speeding on, though in a fashion no king 
 could have dreamed at Agincourt, from the battles of the 
 history books to where the embattled hosts of Britain 
 stand again in France, throwing their bodies like a wall 
 against the dynasties of darkness, destruction, and death. 
 Thirty million men are killing one another, thirty 
 million other men are making things to kill with, and we 
 are riding to the heart of all this woe. Ten million men 
 who did not want to die lie dead on these fields that not 
 
 232
 
 ALL ABOUT US ARE THOSE RICHEST TREASURES IN OUR ISLAND CROWN. OUR GARDENS 
 
 [See Chapter 13
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 233 
 
 long since were smiling with the homes of happy children, 
 and we are riding to this Red Earth. Ten thousand million 
 sovereigns have been spent upon this war, and we are 
 riding to see what men have done with it. We know what 
 we have done with 10,000,000; we have given our aged 
 poor a little comfort in their closing days. How much 
 happiness could we buy, then, with a thousand times 
 10,000,000? Surely we could change the very face of 
 the earth with the power of ten thousand millionaires. 
 Well, these ten thousand millions have changed the face 
 of the earth. Come for a ride with me and see. 
 
 THE RIDE TO VIMY RIDGE 
 
 If you have ever been for a ride in France you will 
 remember the miles and miles and miles of trees that line 
 the roads, you will remember the little white houses every- 
 where and the smiling fields and gardens that have made 
 the peasant the master and the strength of France. 
 
 We are riding through them from Agincourt, through 
 the pleasant plains, through the villages and the little 
 towns, through the endless avenues that give their cooling 
 shade in summer and stand in winter like cathedral aisles ; 
 and the world seems a beautiful place. The sun is out 
 and the loveliness of autumn is about us ; indeed and in 
 truth we ride in joy through France. The people go about 
 their work, the children go to school, we can almost fancy 
 bells are ringing and then .... 
 
 And then .... 
 
 We have come to the end of the beautiful world. The 
 sword has gashed the face of France, the trees are withered 
 and blasted, the avenues are no more, the roofs of the 
 houses are broken, the walls are toppling down, the rooms
 
 234 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 are heaps of rubble, the people have gone, the cathedral 
 bells will never ring again. 
 
 The world slows down; the joy has passed from the 
 face of it. Once this must have been a happy place, for 
 theatre bills are on the walls, and this was once a picture 
 palace, and that was once a church, and up in the bedroom 
 there, ready to tumble into the street, is a little child's 
 cot. Here is a piano, but it will not play; it is as silent 
 as the organ at Rhcims. We touch the keys from the 
 street, but the rains of two years have beaten upon them, 
 and they are dumb. A little boy's picture hangs on the 
 wall above, out in the garden clothes are hanging still. 
 They have hung for a year or two there, but nobody 
 bothers to take them down. There is a spiral staircase 
 in the street, leading from nowhere into the sky. 
 
 There is every kind of broken thing about houses, 
 shops, and statues, wheels and lamp-posts, motor-cars and 
 guns, windows, staircases, doors, tanks, carts, pianos. Up 
 there is a hanging bridge between two buildings, half of 
 it broken away ; and here is a cathedral for this is Arras, 
 the place you meet in Shakespeare, where the tapestries 
 came from, the place where some good man set up a 
 church fifteen or sixteen centuries ago to be a lamp in the 
 darkness until the Germans came from beyond the Rhine 
 and smashed it into bits. 
 
 So long ago a thousand years and more ago the 
 Germans did that, and now again a great cathedral stands 
 exposed to all the rains and winds that come, gaping in 
 ruin once more from German hands. They cross the 
 earth like the shadow of death, and their touch is the mark 
 of the beast. Down a dark hole in the cathedral floor 
 lived a hundred men when fire was falling like rain in
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 235 
 
 Arras, and underneath are miles of excavated ways through 
 which the relieving army moved forward when it was still 
 unsafe to be moving in these streets. Up above, high up 
 in a doorway on a broken wall, stands the figure of a 
 mother and child, silhouetted against the sky. 
 
 But the thought that brings poor Arras back to me 
 is not of all these streets with the scars of war, these little 
 shops still struggling to keep going, this beautiful town- 
 hall shattered into bits it is not of all this pitiful ruin, 
 over the house-tops and under the streets, that I think. 
 I think of this desolate town as we left it and looked back, 
 and saw, rising high above its ruin, the highest visible 
 thing for miles around, a broken Cross. It glittered in 
 the sun in the happy days of Arras, high above the 
 cathedral roof that lies in dust below. Now it stands as 
 the very mark of grief, the badge and sign of this race 
 that has mocked at God, for the Germans have broken 
 the Cross. 
 
 We leave the broken Cross, and deeper into the broken 
 world we go. We are on the road to Vimy, that little 
 village with its ridge of hills, at the very thought of which 
 the heart of Canada leaps high. But a month or two ago 
 it was death to walk these roads. I stop to pull a scarlet 
 poppy growing in a ditch, and somebody says, " That 
 was the German front line." Now the little blue corn- 
 flower is holding up its head and the scarlet poppy is 
 blowing in the wind. The Germans have gone on and 
 on, back and back, over the ridge and down again, and 
 on beyond Lens, where the cathedral tower is still unbroken, 
 where there are cellars, they say, in which British troops 
 hold one end and German troops the other. 
 
 The guns are booming; there is a heavy gun going up
 
 236 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 to the lines. " How far is the British line ? " somebody 
 asks, and the answer is, Four miles. " And how far is 
 the German line ? " and the answer is, Four miles and 
 thirty yards. We are looking down on the very line of 
 fire, on that narrow streak of earth, from the Alps to the 
 sea, where civilisation ends, and across the little space of 
 No Man's Land stand the embattled hosts of devilry. 
 
 They are nothing else than that. You would not 
 believe the things these Kaiser's men have done. You 
 would not believe, would you, that they poured petrol 
 over a woman and set her on fire ? It is better that we 
 should not know, for there would be no sleep at night; 
 but there, entrenched on the other side of No Man's Land 
 as we stand and look at it, is the spirit that does appalling 
 things like that, and prays morning, noon, and night to 
 have the chance of doing that in England as in France. 
 
 And yet, as we climb up Vimy Ridge, it is the stillness 
 of the war that seems so strange, and the quietness of 
 the plain that stretches everywhere in front. We are 
 under observation now " Be careful," we are told. But 
 who is observing us, and what could harm us ? Nobody 
 can see. It is the invisible war. If every human life 
 should leap to light in front of us, how many times ten 
 thousand men would stand before our eyes ? But not a 
 man do we see, and, save for the boom of a gun now and 
 then, Vimy Ridge is as still as the grave; the living and 
 the dead are both beneath the surface of the earth. 
 
 We look out on such a scene in any country place in 
 peace, and we know it is tunnelled by rabbits and foxes 
 and moles, but we look down into this vast plain, and we 
 know it is tunnelled by men. Here, hidden in the earth, 
 a race of free men fights for its life against a race of men
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 237 
 
 enslaved to brutal force, and every yard of earth we see is 
 fortified with flesh and blood and steel. Men have turned 
 this earth that stretches before us, this earth with all its 
 powers of life, into a field of death. Thousands of dead 
 men lie beneath our feet, in this wilderness of mud that 
 was once fragrant with flowers and w T ooded with trees; 
 French, British, German, they mingle in the dust. A 
 man took up a boot, and a leg came out with it; and so 
 perhaps it will be for years. In digging a trench on 
 Salisbury Plain they found the other day the skeleton of 
 a man of the Bronze Age, killed by a battle-axe perhaps 
 thirty centuries ago, and who knows for how many ages, 
 long after this madness has passed from the world, men 
 will dig up wreckage of the time when the British artillery 
 fired five million rounds on Vimy Ridge ? 
 
 The misery of it all oppresses us as we come down the 
 hill, sinking in the mud, skirting the shell-holes, missing 
 the barbed wire as best we can. We are grateful for a 
 steel helmet, which we soon forget we have on, but a 
 humiliation to the dignity of man is the horrible gas-helmet, 
 which must be fixed in six seconds in case of need. We 
 look and feel and flounder in them like men of an idiot 
 race. 
 
 Down in the safety of the plain is a solitary lad. Who 
 is he ? Where is he from ? He used to play in an English 
 village. He was the life and hope of some little home 
 that is thinking of him now, and here he is, war-weary 
 but carrying on, trudging through the mud to the hole 
 in which he lives for England's sake. Here is a village 
 that was and is not now. Here is a cemetery with 3000 
 graves, close by a battlefield where France lost 70,000 
 men. Here are men crouching behind bits of corrugated
 
 238 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 iron and bits of broken wall. Here are trees blown in 
 two in some deserted garden. Words will not fit the 
 tragedy of it. *' The idiocy of it all ! " one says; "the 
 utter idiocy of it all ! " " And yet what could we have 
 done ? " another says. 
 
 Yes, what could we have done ? The world having 
 come to this, there was no other way but this. The sudden 
 hum of an aeroplane reminds us that the days of the old 
 security have gone. Over the ridge was a bunch of 
 aeroplanes, like birds. One of them detached itself and 
 came sweeping down upon us. Nobody knew whether it 
 was friend or foe. " If it is German we have not long to 
 live," our captain said. He took up his glasses and 
 looked, while we four ordinary men, whose nerves were 
 made for peace and not for war, waited for him to speak. 
 " It is oui*s," he said, and we breathed again. 
 
 Tramping over ruined fields, we left the war behind. 
 We came to where the world was looking itself again, the 
 church towers still undamaged, the trees still growing, 
 the shops still open, and children going from school. We 
 were back in the little lanes that look so much like Kent, 
 reminding us how near to us this stricken horror is, this 
 tragedy of ours, our war. 
 
 THE RIDE TO BAPAUME 
 
 No man who has been through No Man's Land will ever 
 forget the day. 
 
 We began the ride at Albert, close by the ruined tower 
 from the top of which for over a year the figures of a 
 mother and child have leaned as if bowed with grief and 
 weeping over the battlefields. It was not very long, but 
 it seemed an unending ride along a road as straight as a
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 239 
 
 ruler, which seemed to be raised above the spacious fields 
 about it, as great and dry and smooth a road as is to be 
 found within sound of the war. It is the ten-mile piece 
 of road from Albert to Bapaume. 
 
 There is no sign of war, and a man can sit in a motor-car 
 and feel all the joy of a ride through Kent in the days of 
 peace. There is not a mark of the beast to be seen, no 
 trees gashed with knives, no cottages lying in heaps, no 
 piles of scattered masonry; this land for miles about us 
 on each side is surely some great heath, ablaze with gorse 
 in spring and afire with heather in the golden sun. It is 
 good to be riding here, though we ride on the way to the 
 war. 
 
 But as we ride through this great spaciousness, with 
 fifty square miles of open earth about us, the mind drinks 
 in the naked truth. Every yard of this land has been swept 
 by war. We ride where the Germans were not many 
 months ago. This road runs right through No Man's 
 Land. This space that seems to know no bounds was but 
 the other day smiling with ten thousand homes, and gardens 
 full of fruit and flowers, and little woods and lanes and 
 laughing children. All, all have gone, the old familiar 
 places, and nothing is left to show where they stood. The 
 villages and the roads that led to them are wiped off the 
 face of the earth, and only a sign put up by a carpenter 
 shows that Pozieres stood here and Contalmaison there. 
 From Albert to Bapaume the scythe of war has swept 
 earth clean, and all that is left is emptiness. 
 
 It would look very different, no doubt, to walk across 
 this wilderness ; it would look, no doubt, like those battle- 
 fields of Gommecourt and Beaumont -Hamel, across which 
 we walked this morning. Stand on the edge of the great
 
 240 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 mine crater there and look about you. It will fill you 
 with dejection to think what men have made of this fair 
 earth, but it will lift you up with hope to know that those 
 holes you see in the ground are the British Army's finger- 
 prints, that these shafts running down in the earth were 
 the German Army's strongholds. Down they go, down 
 fifteen or twenty or thirty steps, with walls and roofs all 
 timbered, and snug little chambers down below, with 
 sleeping-places cut out in the walls, and long passages 
 that lead to another way out. I went down one, and 
 found it strewn with unexploded bombs and German tools. 
 I shall find work in my wood for the axe with which they 
 dug themselves in, and a place on my desk for the bomb 
 with which we blew them out. 
 
 For blow them out we did. Our army crept on inch 
 by inch, and foot by foot, and yard by yard ; out of this 
 ditch into that, out of one hole into a better. They crept 
 on miles and miles five miles, ten miles, twenty miles. 
 It is all too good to believe, but across this desolated land, 
 with its hidden entrenchments, its fortresses of steel, and 
 the mightest defences ever made by man, the British Army 
 crept by day and by night. It moved on as we slept in 
 our beds at home, it fought hard all the winter, it fought 
 hard all the summer, and these men from our Yorkshire 
 farms, from our Lancashire mines, from counting-houses 
 in Manchester and offices in London, the men who have 
 grown up with the plough in Devon, and breathed the air 
 of Scotland's hills, miners from Wales and Irishmen who 
 swear at England one day and fight for her the next 
 they flung these Germans out, and drove them on and 
 on until they had set free from the German heel hundreds 
 of miles of earth like this.
 
 ONE OF THE TREASURES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM THE BEAUTIFUL PORTLAND VASE. 
 
 PROBABLY MADE IN THE TIME OF ST. PAUL, WHICH LAY HIDDEN FOR CENTURIES AND 
 
 HAS BEEN BROKEN INTO 150 PIECES 
 
 \See Chapter [ 1
 
 A CHINESE EWER 
 
 JULIUS CAESAR 
 
 'mi f.->V*KAT -^ 
 
 FROM OLD ITALY 
 
 AN OLD CANDLESTICK 
 
 A STONE PANEL 4OO YEARS OLD 
 
 r~~i 'f . -.. \z* 
 f" _ 
 
 y 
 
 % r ''^ - 
 
 jys;v .*. J ^.-.j-- 
 
 ~ - 
 
 --, :. 
 - . 
 
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 . 
 
 PANEL FROM A TOMB IN CONSTANTINOPLE 3OO YEARS OLD 
 THE RARE AND BEAUTIFUL WORKS OF MEN GATHERED FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD AND 
 
 TREASURED UP IN OUR GREAT MUSEUMS 
 
 I.SW Chapter I I
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 241 
 
 It is slow work creeping across Europe, but man has 
 been fighting the beast for thousands of years, and the 
 end cannot be in a day. See these battlefields strewn 
 with craters full of water. See these roads a foot deep 
 in mud. Remember that the Germans were here two 
 years, building themselves in their underground fastnesses ; 
 that they lived here in war luxury such as the British 
 Army never knew; and then remember that the British 
 Army dug them out of their holes like rats, so that they 
 left their strongholds in such a hurry that there was once 
 a brigadier-general who had not time to take his sword. 
 
 It was an achievement beyond belief, perhaps the 
 greatest test of endurance the British Army has ever 
 known, and it made these fields around the Somme unfor- 
 gettable in the history of the world. Here it was proclaimed 
 to all mankind that a power had risen in the earth that 
 could smash the German Army. Over these fields men 
 first began to fly like birds. They came here flying 5000 
 feet high ; they climbed into the clouds above the Somme 
 until they were four miles up. I saw a man skim the air 
 as if he were a butterfly. 
 
 And in these fields of desolation Science did wonderful 
 things. The telephone wire sent to France every three 
 months in those days was more than enough to wind 
 around the world, and the wonders of wires and wireless, 
 down in the earth and up in the skies, had their place in 
 the great liberation. Strange and terrible it is to look 
 out across the fields of desolation and see the hand of 
 Science in the ruins. It is as if man, with all his powers, 
 had slipped back to the Age of Stone. There was one 
 corner in all this maze of ruin and mud that might almost 
 have been called the Wizard's Home, for wireless masts
 
 242 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 rose from the ruin, there was an imitation tree in which 
 a man could sit at the top and see what the Germans 
 thought he could not see, and there were weather-gauges 
 of all sorts. It is British brain and British heart and 
 British steel, with the immortal soul of a nation behind 
 it all, that has driven the war out of thousands of square 
 miles of Belgium and France, and we move in this stricken 
 world and find the sign of all these things. The sense of 
 the power that overcomes is there. Fallen tanks and 
 fallen men, fallen trees and fallen towers, man and his 
 work and the glory of the earth all shattered and broken. 
 
 At the limit of the fields is what was once a wood, a 
 few skeletons of trees like sticks stuck in the ground. 
 Darkness is closing on this torn face of Nature, and we 
 slow down in our ride as twilight gathers round Bapaume. 
 Not a child is left in all this town, not a woman, not a man 
 unless he wears the khaki of the British Army. Not a 
 house stands as it was. This heap of rubbish was the 
 Town Hall ; on this empty pedestal was the bronze figure 
 of the man who drove the Germans from Bapaume in 
 1871. These Huns were glad to pay him back by melting 
 his statue down, and they were glad, when they fled from 
 Bapaume before the conquering British Army, to hide 
 away in every street and building bombs and mines and 
 chemical surprises which have made this town as pitiful 
 a ruin as any found in France. 
 
 An impressive ride it has been across the stricken 
 fields, but how many hours does a man live through like 
 the hour in which we crept away, crept away from the war 
 in the dark? The Germans are far beyond Bapaume, 
 farther and farther off as these very words are written, 
 but our dark way home brings us nearer to the front, and
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 243 
 
 we wind our way slowly past, watching the flashing of the 
 German guns, hearing the answer of our own, anxious lest 
 a bomb should drop from overhead. It is a cold, dark 
 night, but a little Tommy in a greatcoat is at his post, 
 stopping us in the drizzling rain and wondering whoever 
 we are, and we pass on with all lights out, creeping back 
 towards Agincourt. 
 
 The guns boom and flash as we creep, and it fills a 
 man's heart to think of what is happening over there. We 
 are very near the war, and suddenly there bursts upon the 
 darkness a pair of shining eyes, eyes like balls of flame, 
 and another pair behind them, and another still. Some- 
 thing all-powerful it must be, with lights like these on a 
 road like this, and all-powerful it is. It is going to the 
 guns. It is the ammunition train, a long, long line of 
 motor transport, creeping up in the dark, but flashing on 
 its light for safety's sake if any traffic should chance to 
 pass. 
 
 We creep away from the war and the eyes of fire creep 
 slowly up yes, eyes of fire, that will burn their way slowly 
 through the heart of all this woe until the sun shines on 
 Bapaume again, and Freedom rings her bells. 
 
 THE RIDE TO YPRES 
 
 There are days that seem unreal, and the memory of 
 them comes to us like dreams. " The idea of taking you 
 into Ypres is incredible," said our captain; " I can hardly 
 believe it." Incredible it is; incredible is Ypres and the 
 whole of that wonderful hour that brought us to this war- 
 worn place, this town of ruin and fire, where no man who 
 wakes in the morning is too sure that he will live till night. 
 
 No fields of desolation lead to Ypres. It is stress and
 
 244 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 strain and wonder all the way. Long before we hear the 
 guns and see the shells burst round our aeroplanes, we are 
 caught up in the ceaseless tide that sweeps on to the 
 stricken town. We have only to open our eyes to under- 
 stand the war behind the lines. We believe at last that it 
 really is true that there are a dozen men in the war for 
 every man who holds the fort. We can see how vital the 
 work of our factories is. Not a man at home is there who 
 would waste an hour if. he could come and see this thicken- 
 ing stream of traffic flowing to the war. 
 
 The greatest fighting machine the British Empire ever 
 invented is working about us, and working well. The 
 instinct of a dominating power is in the air. We know 
 the fearful force pent up in these roadside heaps by which 
 you must not smoke or light a fire. We know where all 
 these guns have been in this repairing camp. We know 
 where all these men are going who come up slowly in a 
 countless throng. We know what it is that wears these 
 roads out so that men are working on them almost every 
 day. We know what sent that water-tank like a gaso- 
 meter toppling over. We can imagine the strain under 
 which that motor-lorry broke down and fell into a ditch. 
 
 Think of the energy of a thunderstorm; stand by 
 night and watch the lightnings play, hear the heavens 
 crack and roll, and imagine all this energy made by 
 man. Perhaps you will have some picture then of the 
 boundless energy that moves on ceaselessly along these 
 tired roads. 
 
 We poured 10,000 tons of shells every day for a week 
 into one part of the German lines. The Germans fired at 
 Verdun 12,000 rounds a minute, and a million in twelve 
 hours. One day on the Somme the French fired half a
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 245 
 
 million rounds in one barrage from their field-guns alone. 
 We see where all our money goes. Quite cheap it seems at 
 seven million pounds a day; we wonder it is not seventy 
 millions. 
 
 Think of the stress and strain of all this moving scene, 
 and then think of this that it moves to order, that all 
 this chaos is controlled by time-tables. Nothing here is 
 left to chance. Every motor-waggon must keep its time. 
 If a thing goes wrong this lumbering waggon must be out 
 of the way in a certain time. It must keep a certain space 
 in front of it and behind it, so that its stopping will not 
 hold up the rest. If it breaks down beyond repair, it 
 must be taken to bits where it stands, and taken home 
 as a heap of wheels and lamps and screws and all the 
 thousand things that make it up. The breakdown gang 
 must be ready with its mobile workshop. 
 
 And every part of this moving mass moves in this way. 
 In the end, everything we see in these huge ammunition 
 trains, every letter in these mail vans, every packet of 
 rations in these stores, every bit of hot food in these travel- 
 ling kitchens, will find its way to the man who is waiting 
 for it. 
 
 If war breaks up one civilisation it builds up another 
 as it goes along. The civilisation of a thousand years 
 has gone from Ypres, but the civilisation of a thousand 
 days is there ; it works like a watch, though its atoms are 
 miles apart, and though its threads reach across the sea 
 and spread like a net into every workshop and over every 
 workman's bench. War must build up all the time. It 
 must destroy one day to build up again the next. It 
 must make and re-make all the time the very roads that 
 take it to its goal.
 
 246 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 We are drawing near to Ypres. It is incredible that 
 we should be going so fast, riding on as if the world were 
 ours. Up in the clouds are our watch-towers, a long line 
 of strange balloons, in which men sit looking down on the 
 German Army, reporting to the earth below of what they 
 see, ready to jump from the clouds and glide to earth with 
 their parachutes if ever the moment shall come. 
 
 The sun bursts out in almost summer splendour. The 
 human birds are singing. We are suddenly on a broad 
 highway, and lo ! before our eyes a ruined city stands. 
 The mind flies to the Tiber and the Nile ; we think of the 
 days we walked about in Egypt and Rome. Everywhere 
 is space about us as if the ruin were set on a hill ; the walls 
 are down, the cathedral is broken to bits, the old Cloth 
 Hall, that has stood 600 years, lies in a heap. We sweep 
 through the ruins to the old city square, we look up the 
 Menin road and think of what is happening there, but the 
 excitement of the men-birds, the firing of guns quite close, 
 and the cry of " Gas alert 1 " remind us that danger lies 
 nearer than Menin. I am not likely to forget the minute 
 before we fled from this town, where soldiers stare at a 
 civilian as at something prehistoric, for a shell, that must 
 have come ten miles, fell just behind me in the ruins of 
 the Cloth Hall, burying itself in the rubble of this precious 
 building, which may thus luckily have saved my life. It 
 was as near as a man need wish to get to this war that 
 is devastating our cities and saving our liberties. 
 
 Back and back our Army drives the Germans, but 
 Ypres is not quite safe; every day the shells whizz over 
 it, every night the bombs fall in the street, and we breathe 
 more freely in that little garden, miles away, where Major 
 Redmond sleeps. When we see Ypres again the sun is
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 247 
 
 setting on its ruined towers, and as the light fades slowly 
 over her we pray the day may not be long when another 
 Ypres shall see the dawn. 
 
 And we believe it will be so. We stand on Messines 
 Ridge and see the crater made with nineteen mine 
 explosions. We look about and see this place on one 
 small part of which our heavy guns dropped 80,000 shells. 
 An army that can drive the Germans from a place like this 
 can drive them anywhere. They will drive them from the 
 town we are looking on a mile or two in front, all in good 
 time. Up in the clouds a storm of shrapnel shell is 
 bursting round two aeroplanes. The shells are German 
 and the aeroplanes ours, and though shells burst by the 
 dozen our men sit steadfast and calm, the eyes of an army 
 ever pressing on, ever moving forward to its distant goal. 
 
 THREE THINGS I SAW 
 
 And now we are back in the Island, back in this 
 land to which the whole world looks, longing for the day 
 when Britain again will ride the seas with her ancient 
 power and set the captive free. Not very far away from 
 us is this unutterable woe. 
 
 I have seen the things that are like the end of a world, 
 but it is a new world that will come, and not a heap of ashes. 
 I think of it all and remember three things that I saw. 
 
 I think of the calm fortitude of the people who live on the 
 fringe of the war, the poor people on the stricken edge of 
 France, the boy who " runs behind " in the ceaseless 
 stream of traffic to the war as children run behind our 
 carriers 5 carts ; the old mother whose days are nearly over, 
 pulling cabbages in her garden almost within sound of
 
 248 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Ypres; the man who picks up petrol cans, flattens them 
 out, and patches up his broken house with them. A 
 pathetic sight are these rare touches of humanity along 
 the roads those laughing children among the guns, this 
 old man at the gate. Who are they ? What are they 
 thinking ? One thing, at any rate, we know : they stand 
 for the patience and steadfastness of France in her great 
 martyrdom. 
 
 / think of the spirit of men who have seen the Valley of 
 the Shadow, who know how black it is and set their teeth 
 to walk right through. I think of a little room behind the 
 lines where majors, captains, sergeants, corporals, preachers, 
 cricketers, editors, and railwaymen sit singing little songs, 
 joining in silly choruses, pretending that this planet is a 
 happy place to be on, while just a little way off is being 
 enacted the tragedy of the world. I remember the little 
 private's song about mother at home " I shall come home 
 when the ebb-tide flows," and I hope he will come home. 
 I remember the captain's song about " Our damp little 
 dug-outs in France," and those men in them who cheer- 
 fully endure and never grunt till death or victory comes. 
 And I remember what they told me about the coming 
 back from the fight when seven sit down to dinner out of 
 twenty-two who sat down the night before. " How can 
 you stand that ? " I ask. " Every man thinks of his work 
 in war," the answer comes. " We have our dinner and 
 carry on. It is the only way." 
 
 I think of the smile on the face of the men who are winning. 
 I remember that day at headquarters when the news of 
 Passchendaele came down to that chivalrous commander 
 of the First British Army. I remember the instinct of 
 victory in generals and colonels and in Tommy-out-of-doors.
 
 THE ISLAND FIGHTING FOR ITS LIFE 249 
 
 I remember the colonel who laughed like a boy at the 
 thought that anybody on earth could beat us. And I 
 remember that splendid major who left a great business 
 at home to live in a dug-out in France, who knows that 
 Tommy Atkins in the trenches is the greatest soldier in 
 the world. We have had our failures, enough to break 
 our hearts, but the greatest success of the war is the British 
 soldier, made in a month or two to endure for all time. 
 
 And so I am an optimist, for I have seen the men who 
 know and the things these men have done, and I know 
 that good will conquer evil. It will not be today, it may 
 not be tomorrow, but it is written in the skies that it will 
 come in God's good time. We may sleep and wake with 
 that dauntless faith of Robert Browning : 
 
 I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
 
 I shall arrive ! What time, what circuit first, 
 
 I ask not ; but unless God sends His hail, 
 
 Or blinding fire-balls, or sleet, or stifling snow, 
 
 In some good time His good time I shall arrive ; 
 
 He guides me and the bird. In His good time !
 
 THE MOTHER OF THE ISLAND TALKS TO HER 
 
 CHILDREN 
 
 1917 
 
 I found Britannia sitting on a height, solemn and sad 
 and tired with the burden of the world. 
 
 Proud as in happier days, she looked out across her 
 Island Home. Its green hills were clothed with all the glory 
 of our Hundred Days ; its fields were heaving with waves of 
 golden corn ; its lanes were hung with roses ; its spreading 
 oaks threw out their arms with all their ancient strength ; its 
 yew-trees stood like the sentinels of centuries, guarding our 
 English home ; and the little grey towers of its churches were 
 pointing up to heaven. 
 
 But the bells were not ringing as in other days ; the 
 children were not playing on the sands ; the cricket-fields 
 were silent, for the boys had gone away. 
 
 Ah, how Britannia longed to see her children happy once 
 again ! How, in the still watches of the night, she would kneel 
 and pray that God would give her children peace once more. 
 
 She stood on her great height, and as she stood her children 
 gathered round her. She was dark and grave and proud, 
 and on her brow was the mark of the saddest years that Time 
 has ever known. She was tired, but not weary, for her strength 
 was as the strength of ten because her heart was pure. 
 
 And then I heard Britannia, mother of the British people, 
 speaking. 
 
 Four winters it is, my children, said Britannia, since 
 the Shadow came upon the world four heavy winters. But 
 patience yet a little while, and the happy days will come 
 again. Be proud amid your tears. What have we done 
 in Little Treasure Island in these thirteen hundred days ? 
 
 250
 
 BRITANNIA TALKS TO HER CHILDREN 251 
 
 We have guarded the civilisation of the world and 
 held the fort for liberty. We have kept back from the 
 fields of Kent, from the rolling Sussex downs, from the 
 spreading northern moors, the devilry that stalks across 
 the stricken lands of Europe. 
 
 We have shown the powers of evil that the future of 
 the world is not for them ; that the spirit of liberty, when 
 an enemy comes, will raise up its defenders to the ends of 
 the earth ; that those who love peace, though enemies may 
 catch them unawares, are more than a match for all those 
 who love war. 
 
 We have kept our name clean, we have held our fair 
 fame, at a cost grievous to be borne. We have suffered 
 humiliation and disaster and bitter infamy. We have 
 drawn around us the forces of righteousness through the 
 world. 
 
 We have kept alive the faith of the weak in the strong. 
 We have planted hope in the hearts of millions of stricken 
 people held in hunger, chains, and slavery. 
 
 We have raised up a new England in the world. We 
 have realised a strength of which we had not dreamed. 
 We have tapped new wealth and power that lay all un- 
 suspected round about us. We have found that we can 
 do gigantic things of which we were afraid. We have made 
 the great discovery that the nation which loved peace 
 over all could be transformed as in a night to fight for 
 peace with all the stern terror of war. 
 
 To the ends of the earth we have sent out our armies 
 and fleets. They fight amid the ice and snow and in the 
 torrid sun. They fling their bridges across the rivers 
 and march across the sands. They rise above the clouds 
 and descend into the sea. They fight in marsh and
 
 252 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 jungle and on Alpine heights. Their energy sweeps through 
 every continent; their dauntless spirit leads the world. 
 
 We have done what have we not done in these four 
 years ? Can all our thousand years of history compare 
 with them ? Can the minds of our people grasp and under- 
 stand the burden we have borne ? Pitiful creatures there 
 are who trouble and pester Britannia, gadflies and wasps 
 who sting and buzz about the horse with its heavy load ; 
 but do they not know, have they not heard, of the burden 
 this land has borne ? 
 
 Lift up your heart, hold your head high, for we have 
 borne it well. 
 
 We have raised in ihe Island and the far-flung empire 
 eight million men and a thousand pounds for every man. 
 
 We have let loose the flood-gates of energy and sent 
 forth a stream of human power that Europe has not 
 known since her cities were laid down. 
 
 We have reconstructed the industrial map of the United 
 Kingdom, built new towns, and revolutionised the lives of 
 millions of people. We have three million men and women 
 at work on munitions of war in twenty thousand work- 
 shops. We have built and equipped with power one 
 hundred and fifty national factories. 
 
 We have given women a new place in the nation's life. 
 A million women who never earned a wage before are 
 earning wages now. 
 
 By giving up old luxuries and finding new labour we 
 have carried on at home with our best men at the war. We 
 have run our coal-mines with a shortage of three hundred 
 thousand men, our railways with fifty thousand men short, 
 our Civil Service with ninety thousand and our local govern- 
 ment with a hundred thousand men away.
 
 BRITANNIA TALKS TO HER CHILDREN 253 
 
 We are learning to do without; two of every three 
 motor-cars in the United Kingdom are idle now. We 
 are walking to save petrol, as we are wearing old clothes 
 to save wool. And we are riding on old railways; for 
 every three miles of railway renewed before the war we 
 are now renewing one. We used to import eleven million 
 tons of timber; we are now importing three. 
 
 We have maintained in food and fighting power the 
 greatest armies ever raised, separated by thousands of 
 miles of land and sea. We have handled fifty million 
 separate things a week in our munition shops, and sent 
 off ten thousand consignments on every working day. 
 
 We have transported by sea a mighty multitude of 
 thirteen million men, watched over and guarded with 
 such care that only one life in four thousand has been 
 lost. 
 
 We have sent across the sea two million horses and 
 mules to help the Allies on the fields of war. We have 
 sent seven hundred thousand vehicles, thirty-five million 
 tons of supplies and explosives, and twenty million tons 
 of coal a,nd oil. 
 
 We have six hundred steamers always carrying troops 
 and stores to the theatres of war; we send each week to 
 France two hundred thousand tons of materials and fifty 
 thousand men. Six hundred other ships are taking coal 
 to France and Italy. 
 
 We are making new roads and new railways every day ; 
 week after week our ships carry fifty thousand tons of 
 materials for roads and rails. We have laid down nearly 
 four hundred thousand miles of railways. 
 
 We have run trains from Cairo to Jerusalem. We 
 have set up wharves and river-heads and warehouses and
 
 254 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 shipyards in ancient Babylon. We have thirteen hundred 
 vessels travelling up the Tigris every day, and seven hun- 
 dred on the waterways of France. We have built millions 
 of tons of new ships and repaired forty thousand vessels 
 of war. 
 
 We have kept the sea-gates open against a pitiless foe 
 who sinks whatever he sees. We have defended a coastline 
 of nearly eight thousand miles. Our ships steamed for 
 seven million miles within a single month. 
 
 We have built up an army of flying men who ride above 
 the clouds as safely as our sailors on the seas. In a single 
 week our aeroplanes have flown round our coasts a distance 
 equal to a journey round the world. 
 
 We have brought under cultivation a million new 
 acres of our soil. We are growing six hundred thousand 
 tons more corn a year, and millions of tons more potatoes. 
 
 We have done these things and have raised the money 
 to pay for them. We have raised more money on the 
 good name of Britannia than all the gold in the world 
 could pay. We have paid our way as no other country 
 has been able to do. 
 
 We have sixteen million people who have lent their 
 money to the nation ; there is hardly a home in the United 
 Kingdom which has not lent money to the State. 
 
 We have found the ships, we have found the men, we 
 have found the money ; and we have kept alive the spirit 
 that is more than all. We have kept the fire on the hearth 
 at home. 
 
 We have held the seas in spite of all; we have faced 
 and fought and conquered the weapon that was meant to 
 starve us to defeat. We have kept open a highway on the 
 seas for the greatest army that has ever left America. We
 
 BRITANNIA TALKS TO HER CHILDREN 255 
 
 have poured on to our tables and into our trenches the 
 produce of the greatest harvest-fields on earth. 
 
 We have faced and fought an enemy that knows no 
 mercy; we have faced him and fought him and brought 
 him to the certainty of doom. All the plottings of forty 
 years we have brought to nought in four. We have held 
 back masses of brute force that poured across the Rhine 
 to conquer Europe and engulf mankind; we have held 
 them back and we shall drive them to their lair. 
 
 A little while; lift up your heart and hold your head 
 high, for Britannia's day will come. The power has never 
 yet been known upon the earth that can defeat her. She 
 rides with the sun in the chariots of the living God.
 
 THE DAUNTLESS MEN AND THEIR 
 DEATHLESS DEEDS 
 
 Proudly you gathered rank on rank to war, 
 As who had heard God's message from afar ; 
 All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave 
 To save mankind yourselves you scorned to save. 
 
 CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS 
 
 CAPTAIN JOHNSON of the cruiser Hogue, torpedoed in 
 the North Sea, stood on the bridge as the ship was sinking. 
 He knew that very soon he would be beyond this world, 
 but his last thought was for his country. 
 
 Each ship carries a book containing the secret signals 
 by which one British ship speaks to another. So long 
 as the secret is preserved the enemy cannot read our 
 signals. But when a ship goes down many things in 
 her come to the surface. Captain Johnson's book of 
 signals might by some chance be picked up and betray 
 the British Navy. 
 
 And so, while the stricken ship was reeling beneath 
 him, this valiant captain stood calmly at his post and 
 looked Death in the face, loading his book of signals with 
 leaden weights, so that when the Hogue went down its 
 secret should go with it to the depths. 
 
 THE ANSWER 
 
 AN Italian scholar went to see the British trenches. 
 Our men, he said, lived with heroism and died with dignity. 
 
 256
 
 ONE OF THE LOVELY THINGS IN THE TREASURE HOUSES OF THE ISLAND A RARE 
 BRIDAL CHAIR FROM EGYPT. MADE OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF BEAUTIFUL PIECES 
 
 [S Chapter 1 1
 
 ' .>,--- -v- "'/ 
 
 
 OF THIS RARE WONDER OF THE WORLD, THE TOMB OF MAUSOLUS, ALL THAT IS LEFT 
 STANDS IN* OUR NATIONAL TREASURE-HOUSE AT BLOOMSBURY
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 257 
 
 One day, he wrote in an Italian paper, a whole regiment 
 shouted to their comrades in some distant trenches, " Are 
 we down-hearted ? " and there was an instant's pause. 
 Then a blood-stained spectre raised himself from a trench, 
 shouted "No ! " with his last breath, and fell back, dead. 
 
 GOING BACK 
 
 A VISITOR to a hospital found a private in an Irish 
 regiment, very badly wounded : it was said there was 
 hardly a whole bit of skin on his body. 
 
 " That's a bad case. What are you going to do with 
 him? " said the visitor. "He's going back, sir," replied 
 the orderly. " Going back ! " echoed the visitor, in tones 
 of surprise. " Yes. He believes he knows who did it" 
 
 HUMPHREYS 
 
 HUMPHREYS is asleep in France. Most people did not 
 know Humphreys, but he was the merry boy of the 
 Children's Encyclopedia staff. He grew up with it. He 
 knew the names and faces of thousands of its readers. 
 He made the world bright on the darkest day, for 
 Humphreys was the very joy of life. 
 
 He was the very pick of our English boys, fearing 
 nothing. He would do anything for anybody; he would 
 go anywhere at any time. He would put a lock on a door, 
 or mend a desk, or bring you the population of China, or 
 the distance round the moon, or the greatest depth a 
 submarine can dive, or any of the countless things an 
 editor wants to know at a moment's notice or he would 
 go to fight a dragon. 
 
 And he did. He called and enlisted one morning 
 on his way to the office, quietly and without a word to
 
 258 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 any human being. It was work for a boy, he thought, 
 and he did it. He was in the trenches for years ; he hardly 
 ever had a rest ; he was as happy there as anywhere, and 
 everybody loved him. He would write home after a 
 wound and make merry over his piece of old iron ; he would 
 talk quietly of France as if he were on holiday there ; but 
 never a word would he grumble. He loved the world, 
 and he loved whatever he was doing in it. A great English 
 boy was Humphreys. 
 
 And now he has gone, one more on the long, long roll 
 of our Island heroes, one more on the long, long road that 
 leads to everlasting life. The life of the earth is poorer, 
 but the memory of Humphreys is something rich and rare. 
 
 HE WHO GAVE ALL 
 
 A SALVATION Army sailor went down with a mate on 
 a cruiser torpedoed in the North Sea. The two men clung 
 to a piece of timber, but it was not big enough for two, 
 and they held on till they got weaker and weaker. Then 
 the Salvationist said : " Mate, death means life to me. 
 You are not ready. Hold on to the spar and save yourself, 
 and I'll let go. Good-bye." And he let go. 
 
 THE STRONG MAN BREAKS DOWN 
 
 A THOUSAND times a thousand deeds bear witness to 
 the spirit of heroic men who offer their lives for liberty, 
 and never are they lacking when the hour comes. 
 
 Never was the spirit of these men higher than when 
 a thousand set out in a charge from which five hundred 
 might come back; then their faces were aglow with a 
 spirit that is not of this world. But often in the trenches, 
 when the fight was not between man and man but between
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 259 
 
 man and pieces of flying steel, the brave man's heart would 
 break down. The helplessness of a man against the things 
 that man has made was terrible to see, and at times, as 
 huge shells flew above them, strong men who would walk 
 towards death unflinchingly were seen to bury their faces 
 in their hands and sob like little children. 
 
 PALE BUT CHEERFUL 
 
 WE do not know his name, but he was an immortal 
 boy, and he was on the boat that took the first Australians 
 to the Dardanelles. A steam pinnace came alongside the 
 warship " with two recumbent figures wounded on her 
 deck, and a small figure, pale but cheerful, waving his 
 hand astern." 
 
 What has happened, we wonder, to that " small figure, 
 pale but cheerful " ? We do not know. All we know 
 is that he was just sixteen years old and had been shot 
 through the stomach. He had struck a blow, poor splendid 
 boy, for your liberty and mine. 
 
 THE LOST BUCKET 
 
 ONE of our destroyers lay pitching in a raging gale, 
 with her engines in distress. The commander ordered 
 that oil should be poured on the troubled waters, and the 
 seaman who carried out the order was washed overboard. 
 But the returning wave washed him back again, and as he 
 picked himself up on deck he saluted his officer and quietly 
 said, " Very sorry, sir ; lost the bucket ! " 
 
 Al 
 
 Two British soldiers lay wounded beside a dying 
 German. They were hot and tired and in pain, and one 
 called for a drink.
 
 260 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 The dying German understood. "Here," he said, 
 pointing to his side. Thinking he wanted lifting up, they 
 raised him from the ground, and found that he was lying 
 on his water-bottle. One held it to his lips. 
 
 It was almost his last hour in the world. He was dying 
 for the Kaiser, but there was something of Sir Philip Sidney 
 in this dying man. " No, not me I die ; you drink," 
 he murmured as they held the water to his lips. 
 
 He died, and one of the Englishmen died too, but the 
 other dug a grave and laid his enemy in it. " We buried 
 him properly," he said, " with a kind of headstone, and 
 I got a stick, and I found a piece of paper, and I wanted 
 to write something on it, and so I wrote Al." 
 
 He was one of the Kaiser's men, and he might have been 
 alive today if the Kaiser had been fit to be his Emperor, 
 or to tie the latchet of his shoe. 
 
 IN REMEMBRANCE 
 
 WE must all be still about the brave sacrifice of the 
 mothers of our men, but one mother's tribute to her son 
 has taken its place in the literature that is pure as gold. 
 He was a naval officer who fell in the fight off Heligoland, 
 and his heart-broken mother wrote these words of him : 
 / thank God for every remembrance of you. Is there anything 
 in Shakespeare or Milton more glorious than that ? 
 
 TOMPKINS 
 
 TOMPKINS was a youth on his father's estate somewhere 
 in England. Generally thought " of a dull and lifeless 
 disposition," this is what happened to him at Loos. He 
 was badly wounded, and the officer promised that he should 
 be taken as quickly as possible to the hospital. " If
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 261 
 
 you don't mind, sir, will you take So-and-So and So-and- 
 So ? They are worse than me, and I can quite well wait." 
 The officer did as Tompkins wished, and took his pals 
 to the hospital. When he returned it was too late for 
 Tompkins. 
 
 THE SCAPEGRACE 
 
 THERE was in the Cheshire Regiment a well-connected 
 young man who had brought disgrace on his family, and 
 had enlisted to get away from the police. In one of the 
 big fights he was mortally wounded, and he asked a com- 
 rade to take this message to his father : 
 
 " I'm very sorry for the trouble I have given you and 
 poor mother, but I hope you will forget the past, because I 
 did try to make good as a soldier, and every time I went 
 into action I thought that I would do my best to atone 
 for the past by playing a man's part for Old England." 
 
 Then he died for you and me. 
 
 You AND I 
 
 A BOY in the French ranks fell asleep one night, and 
 his head moved till it rested on the knee of his captain. 
 The captain remained with his knee in a cramped position 
 till it was time for the advance. Then, very gently, he 
 stroked the head of the private soldier, and said to him 
 as the boy rous-ed, " Come, my child, it is time we did some- 
 thing for our country, you and I." 
 
 A TELEGRAM 
 
 DURING the bombardment of Antwerp a telegram 
 had to be delivered almost to the edge of the German lines. 
 
 " Who will go ? " was the query, and three telegraphists 
 replied, " I will."
 
 262 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 " But I don't want three of you," said the officer. 
 
 " Pardon me, sir," interjected one, " the shells are 
 falling quickly, the matter is urgent, allow the three of us 
 to go ; at least one of us is sure to arrive safely." 
 
 All three returned. 
 
 A MOTHER AND HER BOYS 
 
 THERE was a brave old Cornish lady who gave six 
 sons to the Army. First one fell and then another, and 
 when five had been killed the mother sent a heart-breaking 
 appeal to General Bethune, " Do give me back the sixth ! " 
 But England was in peril, and the boy could not be 
 spared. " Please keep him, then," the mother replied, 
 with the spirit that nothing can break. 
 
 PRIVATE HUNT OF THE WILTSHIRES 
 
 PROFESSOR J. H. MORGAN, who went out to the 
 battlefield for the Home Office, found Private Hunt in the 
 Field Hospital, found he was a Wiltshire man, as the 
 Professor is, and so shook hands with him and sat talking 
 by his bed. The soldier was a farm labourer in the piping 
 times of peace, and there was not a man could beat him 
 at mowing, or putting a hackle on a rick, or driving a 
 straight furrow. 
 
 Professor Morgan asked Hunt if his parents were alive, 
 and the soldier was back in his childhood at once. 
 
 " No, zur; they be both gone to Kingdom Come," he 
 said. "Poor old feyther," he said, after a pause; "I 
 mind 'un now in his white smock all plaited in front, and 
 mother in her cotton bonnet you never zee 'em in Wilt- 
 shire now. They brought us all up on nine shillin' a week 
 ten of us, we was."
 
 " I suppose you sometimes wish you were back in 
 Wiltshire now ? " 
 
 " Zumtimes, zur," he said wistfully. " It'll be about 
 over with lambing season now," he added reflectively. 
 " Ay, and the may '11 soon be out in blossom. And the 
 childer makin' daisy-chains." 
 
 His mind went roaming among childhood's memories, 
 and his eyes took on a dreaming look. 
 
 "Mother, she were a good woman; no better woman 
 in the parish, parson did say. She taught us to say eveiy 
 night, ' Our Father, which art in heaven ' I often used 
 to think on it at night in the trenches. Them nights 
 they do make you think a lot. It be mortal queer up 
 there you feels as if you were on the edge of the world. 
 I used to look up at the sky and mind me o' them words 
 in the Bible, ' When I conzider the heavens, the work o j 
 Thy fingers, and the stars which Thou has made, what is 
 man, that Thou art mindful of him ? ' One do feel on- 
 common small in them trenches at night." 
 
 " I suppose you've had a hot time up there ? " 
 
 "Ah, that I have. And I zeed some bad things." 
 
 " Bad ? " 
 
 " Cruel, sir ; mortal cruel, I be maning. We wur in 
 an advance near Wypers. My platoon had to take a 
 house. We knowed 'twould be hot work, and Jacob 
 Scaplehorn an' Oi did shake hands. ' Jarge,' 'e zed, ' if 
 I be took, write to my wife and tell 'er it be the Lard's will 
 and she be not to grieve.' And I zed, ' So be, Jacob, and 
 you'll do the same for Oi ? ' There wur a machine-gun 
 in that there house you know how they sputters. It cut 
 down us poor chaps loike a reaper. And when it wur done, 
 and we had claned our bay'nets in the straw, capt'n
 
 264 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 said, * Men, you ha' done your work as you ought to ha' 
 done.' " 
 
 He paused for a moment. 
 
 "They be bad fellows," he mused. "Oh, they be 
 rotten bad. Twoads they be ! But Oi'm afeared they be 
 strong there be so many on 'em." 
 
 " Are you married ? " Professor Morgan asked. The 
 eyes brightened in the flushed face. 
 
 " Yes, that Oi be ; and Oi 'ave a little boy ; he be a 
 sprack little chap." 
 
 A spasm of pain contracted his face. The nurse was 
 hovering near, and the professor rose to leave. 
 
 " I fear you are in great pain ? " he said. 
 
 " Ah," came slowly back, " but it wur worth it." 
 
 When the Professor called the next day the bed was 
 empty. Private George Hunt was gone. Will somebody 
 be good to the " sprack little chap " he left behind in 
 his village home? 
 
 ENTER THE VICTORS 
 
 THIS picture from Bagdad, from a letter of Sir Mark 
 Sykes, shows vividly the change that came over a Turkish 
 town in a single day, with the coming of the Flag. 
 
 Kut was on the day after its occupation as Kut of the 
 day before, but with a difference. The Turks had gone 
 and the British had come. The British soldier, the first 
 gentleman in Europe or Asia, and his brother the Sepoy, 
 were in possession. 
 
 For the last week the Turkish commander had been 
 maintaining his prestige by daily hangings and shootings ; 
 his last act before leaving had been to shoot six individuals 
 for desertion, spying, or cowardice.
 
 BACK TO THE LITTLE ISLAND THE MAN WHO WON THE WAR COMES HOME AGAIN 
 
 [See Chapter 28
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 265 
 
 Enter the victors; within an hour the women were 
 chaffering milk, dates, and sweet limes, the merchants 
 were offering contracts, policemen were patrolling the 
 dirty little streets, a Governor was established in an office, 
 tired troops were standing in the sun while billets were 
 sought for them, and, most unbelievable of all, the Arab 
 cultivators were dropping in to complain of a certain 
 horseman who had ridden through a crop of beans, and 
 of a supply and transport officer who had packed his 
 belongings in a garden. 
 
 They talk of British atrocities, but it will be enough 
 for history to know that when our soldiers occupy a town 
 within three hours of a hard-won conflict the coffee-shop 
 is thronged, the women do not pause in their work by the 
 water-side, and the fellah instinctively avails himself of 
 the first opportunity in perhaps a thousand years of making 
 a frivolous complaint to an impartial dispenser of justice 
 without fear of being impaled, plundered, or sent to gaol. 
 
 THESE THREE 
 
 HERE is one of the most moving documents ever penned 
 in our English tongue. It was written by a French cavalry 
 officer as he lay dying on the battlefield, with a British and 
 a German at his side, both dying too. When he came 
 to consciousness the other dying men were seeking to 
 comfort him. This is from the letter. 
 
 The German gave us a morphia injection and took 
 one himself. After the injection, feeling wonderfully * at 
 ease, we spoke of the lives we lived before the war. 
 
 We all spoke English, and we talked of the women 
 we had left at home. But the German and the Britisher 
 had only been married a year. . . .
 
 266 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 I wondered ^why we had fought each other at all. 
 I looked at the Highlander, who was falling to sleep 
 exhausted, and in spite of his drawn face and mud-stained 
 uniform he looked the embodiment of freedom. Then I 
 thought of the Tricolor of France, and all that France had 
 done for liberty. Then I watched the German, who had 
 ceased to speak. He had taken a Prayer-book from his 
 knapsack, and was trying to read a service for soldiers 
 wounded in battle. 
 
 And . . . while I watched him I realised what we 
 were fighting for. . . . He was dying in vain, while the 
 Britisher and myself, by our deaths, would probably 
 contribute something towards the cause of civilisation 
 and peace. 
 
 THE MAN WHO THOUGHT OF HOME 
 
 WHAT did they think of it all? these men in the 
 trenches, these men behind the guns ? One of them, lying 
 wounded in a Yorkshire village, told his story. 
 
 " I was brought up," he said, *' to believe that a man 
 who kills another is a murderer, and yet what have I 
 done ? I think about it night and day. It comes to me 
 at night as I go to sleep; it is there when I wake in the 
 morning. I was in charge of a machine gun, and the 
 sight was terrible. Hundreds of men I must have killed. 
 
 " When it was over the thought of it all was more than 
 a man could bear. If this is what the world had come to, 
 I thought, the sooner I am out of it the better, and I put 
 myself under the enemy's fire. I did not want to live if 
 the world had come to that. 
 
 " And then, as I sat there, I remembered. I thought 
 of home. I saw the country lanes, and the flowers grow- 
 ing. I heard the church bells ringing. I thought of my
 
 mother and sister, and I remembered that I had told 
 them I would come back. 
 
 " Then I lay down, and hid myself as best I could, 
 and made a hole and buried myself a little. I lay there 
 seven hours, and at last I was carried away, wounded. . . . 
 How beautiful it is to be here again ! " 
 
 THE BLIND SOLDIER 
 
 IN all the pathetic stories of the war is any sadder tale 
 than this ? 
 
 A Paris workman went out to fight, and his wife and 
 his little daughter received news that he was wounded. 
 In the meantime his wife herself had been the victim of a 
 terrible accident. A paraffin lamp had exploded, burn- 
 ing her face so badly that she is disfigured for life. To 
 spare the feelings of her husband the poor woman did not 
 mention the accident in her letters, but when he was sent 
 to hospital she went to see him. She went with a great 
 dread in her heart, full of pity that he should see her as 
 she was. 
 
 Arrived at the hospital with her child, she made known 
 her mission to the nurse, who, noticing the scars on her 
 face, inquired how she came to receive them. On learning 
 the woman's story the nurse put her arm around her and 
 led her to a seat. 
 
 "Let me tell you," she said; " you must try to be 
 brave. You were told your husband had been wounded 
 in the head, but the truth is that he is blind. Be brave, 
 and I will take you to him. Like you, he has suffered 
 silently." 
 
 " Madame," said the woman, with tears in her eyes, 
 " y u l are ver Y kind, and I am happy. My husband is
 
 268 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 alive, yet he will never see me as I am now, hideous 
 to look upon. We shall have much to be thankful for." 
 
 THE CHARGE OF THE FIVE HUNDRED 
 
 THESE fine words were spoken by the Prime Minister 
 of Australia during the war. 
 
 "I feel that I stand in the reflected glory of the 
 Australian soldier. I never speak, I cannot speak, of 
 their bravery but I choke with emotion. 
 
 " You speak of the Charge of Balaclava. There men 
 went out in the broad light of day with all the impetus 
 and stimulus that a knee-to-knee charge on the gallop 
 gives to men. But the story of the Eighth Light Horse 
 of Australia is one by which the Charge of the Light 
 Brigade must pale its ineffectual fires. 
 
 " These men, there were some five hundred of them, 
 were ordered to attack in three waves. They were given 
 these orders six, eight, ten hours before. Every man 
 knew when he got that order that it was certain death. 
 They went. They made their preparations. They handed 
 to those who were to remain in the trench their poor brief 
 messages of farewell, and they went out, wave after wave. 
 
 " At the whistle the first wave leaped from the trench ; 
 most of them fell back dead upon their fellows who were 
 waiting their turn in the trench. In the face of this 
 awful sight the second line leaped out to meet what they 
 knew was certain death. Of these only five or six remained 
 on their feet after they had gone ten or twelve yards. 
 All the wounded lay exposed to the pitiless machine-gun 
 fire of the Turks, which poured a veritable hail of death 
 into their poor bleeding bodies. The man who got farthest 
 was the colonel; he got fifty yards.
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 269 
 
 "Out of those who went were eighteen officers two 
 only got back. Of the men, the merest handful survived. 
 We must look back in the grey dawn of history before we 
 find a deed like that." 
 
 FROM THOSE AT HOME 
 
 A soldier -mechanic attached to the French flying men 
 received this letter from his sisters one morning. 
 
 " DEAR EDOUARD, We have heard the news that Charles 
 and Lucien died; Eugene has been seriously wounded; 
 and, as for Louis and Jean, they also are dead. Rose 
 has disappeared. 
 
 " Mother weeps. She says you must be brave, and she 
 wants you to avenge them. Jean had received the Legion 
 of Honour; you follow in his steps. 
 
 " All have been taken from us. Of eleven who went to 
 fight, eight are dead. My dear brother, do your duty 
 that is all that is asked of you. God gave you life and 
 He has the right to take it back; that is what mother 
 says. We embrace you with all our heart, though we 
 should love to see you again before you go. 
 
 " The Prussians are here. Jandon's son is dead; they 
 have pillaged everything. I have returned from Gerbe- 
 villiers, which is destroyed the cowards ! Go, dear 
 brother, sacrifice your life. We cherish the hope of 
 seeing you again, for something like a presentiment bids 
 us hope. 
 
 " We embrace you with all our heart. Good-bye, and 
 may we see you again if God allows it. YOUR SISTERS. 
 
 "It is for us and for France. Remember your brothers 
 and grandpapa in 1870."
 
 270 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 LOVE STRONGER THAN DEATH 
 
 NOT even death can quench the love of country in a 
 man. Four things stood out in one day's news. 
 
 A New Zealand soldier, as he lay dying on a height in 
 Gallipoli, raised himself up again and again to signal the 
 position of the enemy. 
 
 The Russian gunboat Sivoutch, going down on fire in 
 an unequal fight against a German cruiser, fought her guns 
 to the last and destroyed a torpedo-boat as she went down. 
 
 The flying men who directed the fire on the German 
 cruiser Konigsberg, hidden from our guns in an African 
 river, continued signalling to our guns as they fell, wounded, 
 thousands of feet from the clouds. 
 
 A soldier on Gallipoli dropping a bomb which would 
 have killed his comrades, sat on it, and was blown to pieces. 
 
 There have been no finer examples in the world of 
 fidelity to duty; they bring to mind the famous story of 
 the sentinel of Pompeii, who stood at his post while 
 Vesuvius buried the town in red-hot lava. 
 
 SOFTIE 
 
 This story was sent to me by a wounded soldier lying in 
 a hospital in Kent. 
 
 Everybody called him " Softie," from the day he 
 joined. He was one of those quiet little fellows who never 
 seemed at home in the Army. He enlisted for the war 
 only, but fighting was not in him. Many times I thought 
 I would like to brain the man who enlisted Softie. And 
 then one day he gave us a surprise. It was like this. 
 
 Everything had been quiet in the trenches, and we 
 were taking things easily. We didn't care what hap- 
 pened. You get that way out there. We had several
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 271 
 
 reports of men giving themselves up to our fellows, but 
 never any our way. One did come, however, at last 
 a big bully of a Prussian Guardsman. He popped his 
 head over our parapet, and he said, in good English, that 
 he wanted to give in, as he was tired of war. Well, we 
 pulled him in and put him under a guard while our 
 captain questioned him. 
 
 Then something happened. I never saw it, but 
 Softie did. 
 
 A rifle of one of the men was lying against some sand- 
 bags, fully loaded, of course, as all rifles are in the trenches. 
 All I remember was that the Hun rushed to the gun, and 
 in a flash put the muzzle of the rifle to our captain's chest. 
 The finger of that cur was on the trigger. 
 
 I stood rooted to the spot, waiting to see the captain 
 fall, when somebody rushed forward, jerked up the gun, 
 and received the bullet in his head. It was Softie. He 
 had saved the captain, and lay dead at the captain's feet. 
 
 We buried him behind the trenches, and there wasn't 
 a dry eye among us as we lay him down to sleep. We 
 put a little wooden cross, and on it we put just 
 
 SOFTIE 
 One who died for his captain 
 
 Greater love hath no man than he who 
 lay down his life for his friend 
 
 There is another grave near, of a Prussian Guard, 
 and its cross bears the words : 
 
 So shall it be meted unto you
 
 272 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 THE MAN WHO LOVED ROSES 
 
 HERE is a beautiful story of a man who left the firing 
 line, burst through a little garden gate, and forgot the 
 war. He was Private Charles Riley, and his home is at 
 Haworth, the home of Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, 
 who would have loved to read this letter sent to their 
 village. 
 
 " This place is a garden almost everywhere," said 
 Private Riley. " Oh, that I could give you the names of 
 all the flowers one sees 1 The roads are lined with ditches, 
 and I never saw anything like the grace and stateliness of 
 the yellow iris growing here. While out for a walk the 
 other day I pulled up at a garden gate. I could smell 
 roses, but could not see them, and, as I was craning my 
 neck to peep, a Frenchman popped round an outbuilding. 
 ' You like flowers ? ' he said, in English. 4 Come, I will 
 show you.' Words fail me. Roses, roses everywhere, 
 and such roses ! Big and little, white, red, yellow, cream 
 thousands of them. He began to cut some for me, 
 and got me such a bunch. Well, you couldn't call it a 
 bunch, it was a heap. I tried to stop him, but it was 
 always ' You love the lovely roses.' On he went from 
 tree to tree, until I was loaded. I shall never forget that 
 night. 
 
 " Going back to my sleeping place, a great change 
 came over the scene. One minute Nature dwarfed every- 
 thing, and the next the awakening. Boom 1 went the 
 cannon, and louder and louder grew the boom. As I 
 looked at the armful of roses I carried, my feelings changed 
 from joy and gladness to deep sadness. The roar became 
 deafening. I toddled wearily along, and met an ambulance
 
 " IF YOU WOULD TOUCH THE VERY COFFIN BY WHICH STOOD RAMESES THE GREAT. 
 TAKING LEAVE OF HIS FATHER BEFORE THEY LAID HIM WITH THE LONG LINE OF 
 PHARAOHS, YOU GO TO THE RARE OLD HOUSE OF SIR JOHN SOANE" 
 
 (See Pw 163
 
 ^n 
 & 
 
 LITTLE JOHN RUSKIN WOULD SIT IN CHAPEL AS STILL AS A MOUSE, WATCHING THE 
 PREACHER IN HIS HIGH PULPIT THUMPING HIS VELVET CUSHION 
 
 (See Pate 174
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 273 
 
 in which three wounded Tommies were sitting and two 
 were lying down. In went the roses. God bless them 
 roses and Tommies I 
 
 4 We are all happy one moment and sad the next, but 
 all are of one mind as to the result of all this pother. We've 
 got to win, and win we shall, and when it is all over, then 
 for home and loved ones not to mention English roses." 
 
 " HAS ANYONE SEEN MR. MARTIN ? " 
 
 THERE had been " a tidy little scrap " at a German 
 trench, and a German mine exploded; and when the 
 men came back to the British lines they came with a fear 
 that deepened into certainty as one after another came 
 in. Their leader was not there. Lieutenant Martin, of 
 Carluke, " the bright-eyed, clean, cheery boy " they had 
 all learned to love in the last eight months, was not 
 accounted for. 4t Are all the rest in ? " somebody asks. 
 And the answer is '* Yes, sir." '* Any one seen Mr. 
 Martin ? " the next question comes, and there is no answer 
 to that, but all the black night long these men are out 
 again, creeping over the parapet, looking for Mr. Martin. 
 
 Suddenly a feeble movement caught a sentry's eye. 
 It was Mr. Martin. He lay at the foot of a German 
 parapet, half buried, with ten feet of earth, reddened 
 with his blood, between him and the most pitiless enemy 
 that ever shamed a battlefield. It was plain the enemy 
 knew he was there. They must have heard his moans. 
 
 And we now know what happened then. We know 
 that Mr. Martin, lying bleeding there in the cruel glare of 
 a hot June sun, begged for a drink of water. The country- 
 man of Philip Sidney called for a drink of water, and these
 
 274 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Kaiser's cowards what do you think they did ? They 
 threw at him an unlighted bomb ! 
 
 His comrades could not stand it. Between them lay 
 seventy yards that no man could cross and live save by a 
 miracle, but they chose a man born and bred in the same 
 village of Scotland as Lieutenant Martin Lance-Corporal 
 Angus. He was to go for the lieutenant. A Canadian 
 officer spoke words of comfort and courage. " Now, my 
 boy," he said, " you are going to certain death." " It 
 doesn't matter much, sir," said Angus, " whether sooner 
 or later." 
 
 Minutes passed; they seemed like hours. The space 
 diminished more and more quickly. At last he reached 
 the parapet, and still the enemy waited, hoping, perhaps, 
 for yet another victim. Quickly, but coolly, Angus did 
 his work. He touched the lieutenant's arm, whispered 
 in his ear, raised him a little, and placed a flask between 
 his teeth. Together they sat up and waited two or three 
 seconds to gather strength for the ordeal before them. 
 At this moment the Germans lobbed a bomb just over the 
 parapet with a grim explosion, raising a storm of dust. 
 Now or never it must "be. 
 
 Hand in hand the wounded officer and his man rose to 
 their feet; and then the Germans made their mistake. 
 So sure they had been of their prey, their cunning over- 
 reached itself. The swiftest runner in the world would 
 have had one chance in a thousand of crossing that open 
 space if only their snipers had shot steadily. Instead, 
 they threw more bombs, and up rose a pillar of smoke, 
 hiding their view of what was happening. 
 
 " Out into our view," wrote a man who saw it all, 
 " stagger two poor wounded figures, stumbling, running,
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 275 
 
 falling, crawling. Down they go, then up again, and on. 
 The German rifles shoot wildly; still on they go, and our 
 line of fire is clear. Our rifles now, one blast from the 
 machine gun, and it is all over; they are safely in our 
 lines. Lieutenant Martin has three wounds, Angus has 
 forty, but the doctor says both will live to fight again." 
 
 THE FLAG COMES UP 
 
 A YOUNG lieutenant was walking up and down a 
 trawler. There was just room to turn round. 
 
 Suddenly the lieutenant's eye saw a long white streak, 
 not like the harmless streak of breaking waves, but 
 ominous in its meaning. It was a thing of death that was 
 creeping on, the mechanical miracle that we call a torpedo. 
 It struck the little vessel, there was a great explosion, 
 and the lieutenant found himself floating among pieces 
 of timber and packages of papers and men who were 
 drowning for their country. 
 
 He could swim well, and he kept himself afloat until 
 something happened that startled him. His foot touched 
 something hard. It was moving. It was coming up. 
 It could not be a fish, it could not be a mine. It was 
 a submarine the submarine that sank them. 
 
 He got ready. He stopped swimming, and fixed him- 
 self on the deck of the submarine emerging from the 
 waves. He took a pistol from his pocket and thanked 
 God that some inventor who may have starved to death 
 had invented waterproof pistols. He sat down and kept 
 his eye on the little trap-door. There was no other way 
 out. That door must open, and the head of one of the 
 Kaiser's pirates must soon pop through. The German 
 commander would be up in a minute to look round. And
 
 276 
 
 so the lieutenant waited, his eyes on the little trap-door, 
 his pistol fully loaded, his finger on the trigger. The 
 door did open, the pirate's head came out, a British bullet 
 pierced his brain, and his body fell across the doorway. 
 
 We may doubt if any crew that ever went to sea has 
 had such a thing to talk about as that submarine had 
 for the next half -hour. They may have thought these 
 amazing British people had found some way to put a 
 sentinel of death waiting for submarines emerging from 
 the waters; they may have thought there was a boat 
 near; they may even have guessed what had actually 
 occurred. They must have prepared to submerge again. 
 
 But the young lieutenant had them fast. He sprang 
 on the dead pirate as a hawk swoops on its prey, clutched 
 him and pulled him forward, and sat on his shoulders 
 so that the legs blocked the open door, and the submarine 
 could not dip. The crew were held in some mysterious 
 grip, unable to go down, not daring to come up. What 
 were they thinking? If by this time they had guessed 
 exactly what had happened, they must have thought 
 that at most the man up there could have but five more 
 shots a drowning man could hardly have had a reserve 
 supply of cartridges, and one of his six had gone. Were 
 there five men down below who dare creep up in single 
 file and risk their lives ? 
 
 The lieutenant waited. Would they dare to come out 
 one by one, or would they find some way of shutting the 
 door, or would they wait till he was numb and stiff, and 
 could not aim ? Would he sit there for hours until dark, 
 and slip off and drown after all? It grew colder and 
 colder. His limbs were cramped, but he held his pistol 
 and kept his eye on the door.
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 277 
 
 And then a stream of smoke came across the sea, and 
 this man moved his eyes for an instant. He saw the 
 British flag. A British destroyer was coming swiftly 
 towards him, and the flag came up in time. In a minute 
 or two it was at his side, and the lieutenant was aboard 
 her, handing over to its captain the German submarine 
 intact, its crew alive, and its commander dead. 
 
 And that is how we caught the submarines sometimes. 
 
 FREEDOM GIVES THANKS 
 
 To the dying corporal of the Coldstream Guards who 
 lay silent for six hours rather than betray his comrades' 
 position by moving. 
 
 To the Colonial soldier who remained up a tree on the 
 look-out for a whole day and came down wounded in 
 several places, with an arm shattered to pieces. 
 
 To the plain man of the Gloucesters who sprang up 
 to take a bayonet thrust meant for a comrade, and said, 
 as he died, "I couldn't help it; he's got a wife and 
 children." 
 
 To the little French boy who went bravely to his 
 death rather than betray the French troops in a wood 
 close by. 
 
 To the powerful seaman of the Creasy who was seen 
 fighting the waves with a midshipman on his back, and 
 disappeared when the middy wanted to thank him. 
 
 To the soldier who was found reading Dumas in the 
 trenches, and to his comrade reading Bergson.
 
 278 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 To the drummer boy of the Aboukir, clinging to a tub 
 in the sea, who, when a man asked if he could help him, 
 said, " No, thanks, old cockey." 
 
 I To the thirty gunners who took the place of thirty just 
 killed, knowing they were going to their death, and called 
 to their comrades as they went, " Good-bye, you fellows " ; 
 and to the other thirty who took their place. 
 
 To Captain Bradbury, who, when in great pain, asked 
 for nothing but " heaps of morphia " so that his comrades 
 should not hear him scream. 
 
 To the five men clinging to wreckage for two hours 
 in the sea, who rubbed each other's legs with their naked 
 feet, and kept their blood circulating. 
 
 To the light -haired boy clinging to a bit of wood as 
 the Cressy went down, cheering up a seaman by saying, 
 " Well, we've got to carry on like this," and then asking, 
 " What's the new chief engineer like ? " 
 
 To the English soldier who dashed into a line of 
 fire to take a message, and fell; to his comrade who 
 followed him and fell; and to the man who delivered the 
 message. 
 
 To the man who washed a comrade's duck suit and 
 promised to have it dry for the morning; who met his 
 comrade the next day in the wreckage of the Cressy and 
 said, as he went down, " Good-bye, old pal; I reckon your 
 suit is dry." 
 
 To the bluejacket who snatched up the white ensign 
 as he dived overboard, held it in his teeth in the water, 
 and slept soundly in it when rescued.
 
 DAUNTLESS MEN AND DEATHLESS DEEDS 279 
 
 To Lieutenant Dimmer, who remained at his gun after 
 being shot five times, until the gun was destroyed. 
 
 To the woman at Winburg, in the Orange Free State, 
 who snatched the Union Jack from rebels who had 
 trampled it in the dust, bound it round her waist, and 
 dared them to touch it again. 
 
 To the boy who looked after the mules while the 
 bullets flew around him, and said, when asked if he was 
 afraid, " I hadn't time to think about that. If I had lost 
 the mules you would have sent me away, and I couldn't 
 stand that." 
 
 To the officer in Togoland who brought a wounded 
 man out of action on his back, and said, " I didn't run 
 away much as I should have liked to." 
 
 To all those who died that Freedom may live.
 
 THE RED MEN OF HISTORY 
 
 Summer 1918 
 
 ALL the world knows who made the war. Wherever 
 civilisation runs the fact is known. 
 
 Truth will not be hidden; though it lie deeper than 
 the bottom of a well it will come to light. Nothing 
 within the boundless universe is more certain than that 
 truth will out. 
 
 And now, like a flash of lightning from the skies, the 
 truth comes from the heart of Germany. It was written 
 in the private diary of the German Ambassador in London, 
 Prince Lichnowsky. It was written in secret for the 
 information of history, which cannot be deceived and will 
 accept no lies ; but, by that process which some men call 
 chance and some believe to be the moving of the finger 
 of God, the truth that was meant for history has been 
 revealed . 
 
 It settles any doubts that any man could have 
 about the guilt of Germany. It puts the makers of the 
 war side by side with Judas and Herod and Cain. 
 
 For what have they done ? They sowed the seed of 
 the war; they stopped the men who tried to stop it; 
 they shut the door on every chance of peace. They told 
 their Ambassador in London to mind his own business 
 and cease interfering when he saw their foul game and 
 dared to speak. 
 
 280
 
 THE RED MEN OF HISTORY 281 
 
 Prince Lichnowsky came to London two years before 
 the war, and was received with open arms. He can find 
 no words too warm to describe his welcome; parties 
 rivalled one another, he says, in their courtesy to him. 
 He found friends everywhere; he found no jealousy; he 
 found great sympathy with Germany; and he was con- 
 vinced soon after he came that under no circumstances 
 whatever need Germany fear a British attack, or British 
 support for an attack by any other country. Neither on 
 account of the German Fleet nor on account of German 
 trade would England ever have drawn the sword, he 
 says. 
 
 He found that it was the constant vigilance of the 
 British Government to secure fair play, and more than 
 fair play, for Germany. " We do not grudge Germany her 
 colonial development," said a member of the British 
 Cabinet to him; and again and again we made Germany 
 concessions. In the grave discussions over the Balkan 
 War, Prince Lichnowsky writes, Britain hardly ever 
 supported France and Russia, but supported Germany 
 instead, in order not to give an excuse for a quarrel, 
 " such as a dead archduke was to give later on." 
 
 We went to astonishing lengths to convince Germany 
 of our goodwill. We tried to stop the mad race of building 
 ships. It is amazing, but it is true, that the British 
 Government introduced British capital into Germany, and 
 helped the development of the German colonies. Every- 
 body tried to please this Government that was plotting 
 to break the peace of Europe. 
 
 But, in spite of all this, says this honest Ambassador, 
 Germany would not pursue the path of peace. With 
 goodwill in Berlin, says the Prince, everything could have
 
 282 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 been settled at one or two sittings, but Germany wanted 
 war. These are the words of Prince Lichnowsky : 
 
 We insisted on war. The impression grew stronger and 
 stronger that we wanted war under any circumstances. It 
 was impossible to interpret our attitude in any other way. . 
 
 Germany was determined to bring about " the greatest 
 catastrophe the world has ever seen." That terrible 
 midnight came, and the next morning Prince Lichnowsky 
 left this land where he had been so welcome, in which he 
 had striven to save the world from war. Great people 
 went to say good-bye to him. A special train was sent 
 with him to Harwich, and he passed to his ship through 
 a guard of honour. 
 
 It is something to be proud of to the end of our lives, 
 this passing of Lichnowsky. The Kaiser sent our Ambas- 
 sador home as a bullying schoolmaster sends a pupil from 
 his room. He sent the French Ambassador home with a 
 soldier pointing a loaded pistol at his head for half an 
 hour as they passed by the Kiel Canal. We sent home 
 Prince Lichnowsky as a friend leaving friends, as an 
 ambassador of humanity, and we read in his diary these 
 words that fill us with pride : " / was treated like a departing 
 sovereign" 
 
 " Such was the end of my London mission," writes 
 the Prince. " It was wrecked, not by the wiles of the 
 British, but by the wiles of our own policy." The world 
 has passed through four dark years since then, and, 
 writing after two years of war, Prince Lichnowsky says, 
 with infinite pathos, that he realised too late that there 
 was no room for him in the German system. And then 
 he writes, with an almost broken heart : "I had to sup-
 
 THE RED MEN OF HISTORY 283 
 
 port in London a policy the heresy of which I recognised. 
 That brought down vengeance on me, because it was a 
 sin against the Holy Ghost." 
 
 Prince Lichnowsky is under no delusion. He knows 
 that Germany has lost the war. The future will belong, 
 he thinks, to Anglo-Saxondom, and there will be realised 
 the great dream of those who see the salvation of humanity 
 in the expansion of British liberty. 
 
 So says the honest German. What the German people 
 think of it, with their youth dead and perishing in France, 
 we shall see when we see. The shadows are gathering 
 about them. Through the long, dark valley the sun of 
 Liberty will dawn, and these Red Men of History, with 
 all the evil forces they control, will be flung from their 
 thrones and perish in oblivion. Then those who fought 
 for righteousness shall shine with the brightness of the 
 firmament, and they who bring nations to peace, as the 
 stars for ever and ever.
 
 THE GREAT SHADOW IS LIFTED FROM 
 THE ISLAND 
 
 The Eleventh Hour of 
 the Eleventh Day of 
 the Eleventh Month of 
 the Year of Liberty, 1918 
 
 THE Great Shadow has been lifted from the Island. 
 The long, long night has passed and mankind is at the 
 Dawn. The world begins again. 
 
 These wonderful Six Weeks have been like a new Six 
 Days of God. In six days, the beautiful poetry of the 
 Bible tells us, God made heaven and earth ; we have lived 
 to see six weeks in which His everlasting power has 
 brought mankind to the gates of a* new heaven and a 
 new earth. 
 
 The solemn stars look down tonight on scenes they 
 never saw before since light burst out of darkness. It 
 is almost like Creation once again, with men and women 
 looking on. The great powers that men have trusted 
 have broken down. The pomp and vanities of men are 
 in the dust. Nations are toppling to pieces, and kings 
 are begging mercy from their people. The maps of 
 Europe and Africa and Asia will have to be remade. 
 The things that have been strong a thousand years are 
 suddenly weak; the faith men put in princes and princi- 
 palities and powers is suddenly dissolved ; and every man 
 alive knows now that Paul was right when he said, " The 
 
 284
 
 THE SHADOW LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND 285 
 
 things that are seen are temporal; the things that are 
 unseen are eternal." The things that were seen have 
 crumbled into dust; the things that are unseen have 
 become the masters and possessors of the earth. 
 
 We are living through the greatest hours in all the 
 story of the world. For a hundred million years the stars 
 have looked down on earth ; for millions of years life has 
 been dawning and winning new powers ; for thousands 
 of years a mighty multitude of human beings have come 
 and gone and done immortal things ; but the solemn story 
 of the centuries has nothing so astonishing as this supreme 
 event in the midst of which we live. 
 
 Europe for a thousand years has been the heart of our 
 living world. It has been the centre of progress and the 
 home of knowledge. It has come to dominate the world. 
 Its Governments have been the arbiters of the destinies 
 of the human race. The great peoples outside Europe 
 some of them aloof and far away, some of them throbbing 
 with life and building up stupendous powers were all at 
 the mercy of Europe, swayed by her customs, governed 
 by her laws, or subject to her influence in vital ways. 
 The very axis of the fabric of the earth was Europe, with 
 its four hundred million people governing, controlling, 
 or powerfully affecting, a thousand million more. 
 
 And now our Europe is shaken to its very foundations. 
 This Europe that was so peaceful, the home of laughing 
 children, of beautiful gardens and cities, crowned with 
 lovely books and pictures and all the dreams and achieve- 
 ments of our race, has been shattered from within, broken 
 to pieces by a terrible power that all our lives has been 
 allowed to flourish in our midst. A handful of men have 
 broken civilisation down, and every joyous place in Europe
 
 286 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 has been a house of pain. For years men sowed the seed 
 of war, and the seed bore fruit and brought Europe 
 toppling down. 
 
 So Europe came to the precipice. So through four 
 bitter years her manhood fought against the powers of 
 evil in the yawning gulf of war. Nearly a million of 
 our noblest men lie dead in France, in Palestine, by the 
 waters of Babylon, in the bed of the sea, or on Gallipoli ; 
 in Europe there can be hardly less than ten millions dead 
 and twenty-five millions wounded. In the civilised world 
 is hardly a home that has not been ruined or saddened 
 or broken. 
 
 And now, at last, the accursed war is over, and the 
 world begins again. We come to the gates that lead us 
 out of the Great War into the Great Peace of all mankind, 
 and we come with heart and soul uplifted, for the powers 
 of evil have been vanquished and War is banished from 
 the earth. It will never raise its head again in Europe. 
 The nations of the English-speaking race, the liberty- 
 loving people of Italy and France, will see to that. These 
 men of ours who lie in peace have won for us a peaceful 
 world. We pass from the shadows into the sun. The 
 nations of the world begin again. 
 
 For four years and more we have lived through War, 
 with its dire perils and its great heroisms, its deeds of 
 fame and infamy, its hopes and fears and heart-breakings, 
 the rapid blow on blow of the evil powers, and the long 
 wait for Victory; and for four years life has been a long 
 waiting for this moment. Now that the end of it all has 
 come upon us, we can only rejoice in the return of peace 
 and the vindication of righteousness. We have had great 
 allies, the alliance of all those who love freedom in the
 
 THE SHADOW LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND 287 
 
 earth, but, above and beyond and behind all these, the 
 alliance of those invisible powers behind mankind. 
 
 Two things stand clear in this great hour amid this 
 turmoil of the world the grim resolve, the quenchless 
 faith, and the patient endurance of the powers of ever- 
 lasting justice ; and the defeat and despair of the powers 
 built up on force. 
 
 A LL through the great disasters of the war we 
 carried on. 
 
 The Germans stole through Belgium in the night. 
 They surprised the whole world by tearing up their treaties 
 and trampling on their written word. So they won a 
 stupendous advantage, crushing Belgium and menacing 
 France. They came close to the gates of Paris. They 
 overwhelmed our British army with the sheer weight of 
 their numbers. It seemed to be beyond all human power 
 to drive their forces back. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 We were short of shells. Our little army was cruelly 
 slain for want of machine-guns. They went out against 
 the best-equipped army in Europe, often with nothing 
 but the justice of their cause to defend them. Our 
 munitions ran so low that our guns sent one shell back 
 to Germany's fifty. Our lines were so thin that dozens 
 of men kept thousands at bay. Once, when there came a 
 grave appeal for reinforcements, the only answer Lord 
 French could make was, " You can have my orderly." 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Treasons and mutinies gathered about us. The 
 Khedive of Egypt turned traitor. There was trouble in 
 North Africa with the Senussi tribe, in South Africa
 
 288 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 rebels seized all ammunition, and the War Office had not 
 an ounce to send. South Africa was menaced. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 We sailed out proudly to the Dardanelles, into the 
 shadows of defeat. Our men died there like flies. They 
 fought with matchless courage, they endured with match- 
 less fortitude; but war and pestilence and a famine of 
 men overcame them in the end, and 80,000 of the very 
 flower of heroes lie buried in Gallipoli. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Liberty reeled in the Balkans. Bulgaria betrayed the 
 countries that had made her free. Serbia was overcome 
 and broken to pieces. The King of Greece tore up his 
 promise to defend her, and sold his army to the enemy. 
 There was treachery in Montenegro. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 The enemy abandoned law and honour and civilisa- 
 tion, invented new weapons of war, filled the air with 
 poison gas, poured liquid fire into our troops, and poisoned 
 wells. Our soldiers suffered agonies like these while our 
 scientists thought out new inventions to protect them. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Unable to break the spirit of our armies, the enemy 
 made war on peaceful towns to break the spirit of our 
 people. They dropped bombs from Zeppelins on streets 
 and shops and hospitals. When we beat the Zeppelins 
 they dropped the bombs from aeroplanes. They murdered 
 hundreds of innocent people, kept whole towns awake 
 at night, and struck terror to the hearts of the poor. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Disaster on disaster befell the Allied armies, short of 
 men. We surrendered at Kut; the Italians reeled back
 
 JOHN THE BAPTIST, THE SPLENDID PICTURE BY GUIDO RENI IN THE LITTLE ART 
 
 GALLERY AT DULWICH 
 
 \ScePage\72
 
 OUT OF GOD'S COUNTRY WE COME INTO MAN'S TOWN AND CROSS THE RIVER WHERE 
 WREN'S MIGHTY DOME LOOKS DOWN. WITH ITS GOLDEN CROSS DAZZLING IN THE SUN, 
 THE FAIREST THING THAT LONDON'S STREAMING MILLIONS LOOK UPON 
 
 [SPa.l75
 
 
 THROUGH PRIMROSE TUFTS. IN THAT GREEN BOWER, THE PERIWINKLE TRAILED ITS WREATHS - 
 AND TIS MY FAITH THAT EVERY FLOWER ENJOYS THE AIR IT BREATHES. WORDSWORTH 
 
 HERE IN THIS SEQUESTERED CLOSE 
 BLOOM THE HYACINTH AND THE ROSE; 
 HERE BESIDE THE MODEST STOCK 
 
 FLAUNTS THE FLARING HOLLYHOCK 
 HERE, WITHOUT A PANG. ONE SEES 
 RANKS CONDITIONS. AND DEGREES 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON
 
 I CANNOT TELL WHAT YOU SAY. GREEN LEAVES, I CANNOT TELL WHAT YOU SAY ; 
 BUT I KNOW THAT THERE IS A SPIRIT IN YOU. AND A WORD IN YOU THIS DAY. 
 
 CHARLES K1NGSLEY 
 
 SOON WILL THE HIGH MIDSUMMER POMPS COME ON 
 SOON WILL THE MUSK CARNATIONS BREAK AND SWELL. 
 
 SOON SHALL WE HAVE GOLD-DUSTED SNAPDRAGON. 
 SWEET-WILLIAM WITH HIS HOMELY COTTAGE-SMELL. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD
 
 THE SHADOW LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND 289 
 
 in the mountains with colossal loss of men and guns ; in 
 France the gains of a year were lost in a week or two. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Russia failed us. The Revolution to which we pinned 
 our faith was captured by the enemy and turned against 
 us. With Russia gone, Rumania fell, and the tragedy 
 of the Balkans was complete. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 The German Fleet turned pirate. Their submarines 
 sank ships at sight. Peaceful travellers were drowned in 
 thousands. War ships or food ships, allied ships or neutral 
 ships, one after another they went down. Not a child was 
 safe at sea, and without sea-power the Allies must lose. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 America came in all unready, her armies untrained, 
 her supplies of vital materials running out. We had to 
 wait for her aeroplanes while she sent to India to fetch 
 the seeds to grow the plants for castor oil. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Our ships were sunk in millions of tons, our mercantile 
 marine was disappearing. Our tonnage was descending 
 towards the point at which defeat appeared inevitable. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 Food ran short. We were not sure that our bread 
 supplies would last. There was not enough meat or sugar 
 to go round. Food rose to famine prices. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 The cost of the war went up to eight million pounds 
 a day. The War Bill was higher for a month than the 
 Peace Bill for a year. Our finances were taxed to the 
 uttermost. We pledged our last security abroad. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 u
 
 290 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 One hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, five 
 hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand, of our noblest 
 men lay dead; one million, two million, were wounded; 
 and our mines and factories and workshops at home were 
 crippled in the effort to replace them. 
 
 But we carried on. 
 
 , through good report and ill, we carried on. Through 
 clouds at home and storms abroad, through the weary 
 years of waiting, through terror and peril and disaster and 
 death, we looked up to the stars and kept the faith. While 
 Europe rocked and reeled, the land of Alfred and Crom- 
 well and Nelson stood as a rock to all the winds that 
 blew. Whether Peace would come by Christmas or next 
 year or the year after, whether this or that ally fell out, 
 whether Amiens or Paris or the Channel Ports went down, 
 whether America came in or not, whether the war on land 
 were lost or won, this century or the next, Britain would 
 hold the seas for Liberty and carry on till Germany had 
 not a shell left for her guns. 
 
 And she carried on, till Germany cried for mercy and 
 begged for bread. 
 
 pOR the proud German Empire is a beggar at the 
 door. It is begging for bread. But yesterday it seems 
 that she stood so high, with her seventy million people 
 prospering, with all the powers of science harnessed to their 
 happiness; and now she lies so low, with none so poor 
 to do her reverence. The greatest Power on the continent 
 of Europe has fallen to the dust. 
 
 It is a sight to break the human heart, this nation once 
 so proud. She grew rich beyond her dreams. She kept
 
 THE SHADOW LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND 291 
 
 a dozen kings in glittering splendour. Her fields were 
 tilled with tireless energy; her forests were decked with 
 beauty; her waterways were scenes of industry and 
 pleasure ; her railways hummed with the trade that every 
 year advanced by leaps and bounds. She sent to all the 
 world toys for children to play with, tools for men to 
 work with, instruments of science for opening up new 
 treasures of knowledge. She had all the material things 
 a nation needs to make it content. 
 
 But nations do not live by bread alone, and Germany 
 forgot that. She became drunk with the sight of power. 
 She had come to power not, as England came, through 
 a thousand years of toiling upward, fighting tyrants, 
 battling with injustices, sweeping away ignorance, and 
 lighting up dark places Germany did not grow like that. 
 The German Empire did not grow at all; it was made. 
 It was not a natural coming together of people with the 
 same ideas, the same faith, and the same purposes in the 
 world : it was made as in a night. 
 
 One man set out to make it fifty years ago. He 
 arranged it in his mind as a man arranges a machine he 
 is going to build. He would build it all round Prussia, 
 the most powerful German-speaking State in a group of 
 twenty. He would get rid of Austria, with all its German- 
 speaking people, because Austria was another made-up 
 Empire, which would stand in the way of his dreams. He 
 would take a bit of Denmark, so that he could build a 
 great canal leading out to the North Sea, which he would 
 call the German Ocean. He would break the power of 
 France and steal her iron-fields, and then, at the great 
 Palace of Versailles, he would set up his new German
 
 292 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 Empire. He dreamed it all, and did it all, and nobody 
 in Europe minded very much, and Queen Victoria rejoiced. 
 With France defenceless in the grip of the German Army 
 the conquerors went to Versailles, and there the German 
 Empire was proclaimed. 
 
 This new Great Power had come suddenly into Europe. 
 Like a Juggernaut she had made her path. She could 
 look forward through the years and see her mighty powers 
 unfolding, and one would have thought that in that solemn 
 hour the heart of that empire would be lifted up in faith 
 and thankfulness and deep humility. But what hap- 
 pened on that first day of the German Empire was sinister 
 and prophetic of all that has come. France was fallen 
 low, and it seemed worthy to the German Emperor to 
 put up a preacher in a pulpit at Versailles to preach the 
 first official sermon of the German Empire from the text 
 written on the wall of the doomed Belshazzar at his 
 feast : Thou art weighed in the balances and art found 
 wanting. 
 
 In that hateful and terrible spirit the German Empire set 
 out on its great journey ; it was from that depth of human 
 meanness that it rose. It had no understanding of an 
 empire's place and duty in the world. It grew up in 
 selfishness and the conceit of power. It rattled its sword 
 and paraded its pomp. Its little kings bowed down to 
 their great king, who strutted across the stage of Europe 
 like a fighting-cock. He would break the power of 
 England ; he would bring the British Empire down. 
 
 Well, the world has seen the end of these things in 
 these thrilling days. Bismarck said before he died : 
 " When I have been in my grave twenty years I shall come 
 back to see if Germany has stood in honour with the
 
 THE SHADOW LIFTED FROM THE ISLAND 293 
 
 world." It is just twenty years, and if Bismarck keeps his 
 word he will come back to a Germany begging for bread. 
 
 perishes evil; so passes the vanity of this world. 
 The moral powers that rule mankind are more than 
 all that are against them. The justice in this world that 
 never sleeps has overcome this power that put her trust 
 in princes. 
 
 Far-called, her navies melt away, 
 On dune and headland sinks the fire. 
 
 Lo, all her pomp of yesterday 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre. 
 
 The solemn lesson is for us and all mankind. No 
 power can live on earth except in liberty and righteous- 
 ness. The eternal powers that never fail are in the hands 
 of God, to whom we pray, in Kipling's noble words : 
 
 For heathen heart that puts her trust 
 In reeking tube and iron shard, 
 All valiant dust that builds on dust, 
 And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 
 For frantic boast and foolish word 
 Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord ! 
 
 Judge of the nations, spare us yet 
 Lest we forget, lest we forget I
 
 WHAT THE WORLD FOUND ON THE 
 BATTLEFIELDS 
 
 THERE were angels at Mons, and this is their story. 
 They came upon the stricken fields with powers that men 
 have never known before. They held in their hands 
 the keys of life and death, and for every man who died 
 for us in France these Angels of Mons saved one. 
 
 We are too near it now to understand the whole of 
 this great story, but in the years to come it will be known 
 that there was wrought on the battlefields of Europe a 
 thing that we can only call a miracle. For ages to come, 
 long after men have forgotten the battles of the Aisne, 
 the Yser, and the Marne, they will talk of the mighty 
 victories wrought on these battlefields without a bayonet 
 or a gun. Time will roll on its way, and the Kaiser will 
 live in infamy with Judas who betrayed his Lord, but 
 men will not forget this Victory. 
 
 Amid the tumult of the battlefield, pursuing the grim 
 spectre of war wherever he goes, stood a man who was not 
 afraid. Amid all the foul forces of darkness stood a man 
 with a torch that never dies out. Amid the cries of anguish 
 and defeat stood a conqueror who was never dismayed. 
 
 He was the Man of Science, bringing life and healing 
 to the fields of death. He was like another Frankenstein, 
 facing the terrible thing that he has made, the powers 
 that men had turned to evil, but his touch has still its 
 ancient power, and out of the very jaws of death he 
 rescues life. He must have cut our casualties in two. 
 
 294
 
 WHAT THE WORLD FOUND OUT 295 
 
 Terrible as the position of Europe was, the Man of Science 
 made it possible for us to contemplate this fearful scene 
 and still lift up our hearts. 
 
 In war a nation slips back out of the conditions of 
 civilisation into the conditions of barbarism. The things 
 that make the difference between the health of a great 
 city in these days and in the Middle Ages have come 
 about through centuries of toil, and in war men find the 
 world as if all these centuries had not been. And so 
 great armies, suddenly sweeping over a country, have 
 always found themselves in the grip of disease. The 
 bullet, it has been said, has always found a brother in the 
 bacillus, and the brother has been worse than the bullet. 
 It was disease and not war that broke the power of Greece ; 
 it was disease before which Constantinople fell; it was 
 disease that destroyed the Grande Armee of Napoleon 
 on its retreat from Moscow; it is disease that has always 
 been the soldier's deadliest foe. We need look back only 
 to our previous war on the continent of Europe, when 
 Constantinople was at our service and the Dardanelles 
 were open to our ships. We can hardly believe now what 
 the situation in the Crimea was then. This is a general's 
 description of it : 
 
 With each round of the sun nearly a hundred gallant 
 soldiers raved or languished out their lives; as the jaws 
 of the grave closed on the prey of today, they opened 
 as widely for that of tomorrow. It might be thought 
 that at this rate the grave would exhaust its victims; 
 that some day it would gape in vain. But no; the sick 
 flocked in faster than the dead were carried out, and still 
 the dismal stream augmented, till the hospitals over- 
 flowed, while still faster poured the misery-laden ships 
 down the Black Sea, feeding the fishes with their dead.
 
 296 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 The heart of these islands was shaken with anger and 
 remorse, and the nation made tremendous efforts to over- 
 take its terrible neglect. But the death-rate grew and 
 grew, so that in four months we had more men in the 
 hospitals than out. 
 
 Always it has been the same with great armies. For 
 every ten Germans killed in France in 1870, fifteen died 
 by disease ; for every ten Russians killed in 1877, twenty- 
 seven died by disease ; for every ten British soldiers killed 
 in Egypt, forty-two died by disease. In the Boer War, 
 for every seven men killed by bullets ten men died from 
 disease. It was disease and not cannon that swept away 
 the armies of the past ; and we need not be surprised that 
 men of science trembled to think of what might happen 
 in Europe when Germany let loose the dogs of war. 
 
 It would not have been surprising if there had broken 
 out a plague the like of which the world had never known. 
 
 Never had so many men abandoned the life of civilisa- 
 tion to live a life akin to the beasts of the field, and the 
 soil of France and Belgium was the worst battleground in 
 the world for them. Just because it is the best soil in the 
 world for feeding men it is the best soil for killing men. 
 The surface of the earth is full of living germs. Millions 
 of creatures there are in every sod we touch. There are 
 good creatures and bad, and the more intensely cultivated 
 the soil is the more closely packed it is with certain germs 
 of death that lurk and wait for a scratch or a bruise or a 
 cut through which they can enter into man. Never since 
 the Dark Ages had Europe placed itself so utterly at the 
 mercy of the foul things of this world. 
 
 Yet science was at its height, and it is science that 
 Europe must thank for saving it from an unparalleled
 
 WHAT THE WORLD FOUND OUT 297 
 
 catastrophe. Confronted with the danger of an epidemic 
 that should sweep the Continent, seeing the blood of 
 Europe slowly poisoned in the bodies of millions of men, 
 women, and children in every land, the men of science 
 stood at their posts and faced the most appalling problem 
 that has ever engaged the human mind. 
 
 And they did not fail; they stood at their posts, and 
 it is humanly certain that they worked out the salvation 
 of Europe. They kept the Great War in chains; we 
 may almost say they guaranteed that there should be a 
 Europe left to put things right again. 
 
 Those who know how slow real progress is will marvel 
 at the wonders these men of science did. For years we 
 have had the power to banish half the great diseases, but 
 we have let our power lie idle and let our people die. 
 But war is a great master. It can do in a day what 
 reformers have failed to do in a generation. It can 
 nationalise the railways in an afternoon ; it can take over 
 coal-mines, close public-houses, seize factories; it can 
 take a loafer who cares nothing for his country and shake 
 him up and make him fit for the honour of dying for his 
 motherland. It can do by a stroke of the pen a hundred 
 things that no king could do in England in the quiet 
 times of peace. And so Science, clothed with the power 
 of war, was working wonders just behind the firing-line. 
 While the men in the trenches were keeping back the 
 Kaiser's men, the men in the laboratories were keeping 
 back the enemy that crept unseen. 
 
 We must understand one thing clearly about wounds. 
 Unless they touch a vital part they are not dangerous in 
 themselves, and a man might be wounded in many places 
 and run no risk of dying except for one thing. The wound
 
 298 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 has made an opening into his body, and there are millions 
 of invaders always ready to creep in. It is this invasion, 
 and not the wound itself, that imperils his life. The 
 enemy's bullet is bad enough, but the worst thing about it 
 is that it opens the door for a much more terrible foe; 
 it opens the door for the agents of death that lurk about 
 us everywhere, day and night, waking and sleeping, in 
 war and in peace. 
 
 The great triumph that waits to be recorded on the 
 credit side of the war is that the Man of Science stood 
 there ordering Death back. He ordered Death back as 
 Canute ordered back the sea, but with this difference 
 that, while the sea came sweeping on till Canute himself 
 moved back, Death obeyed man's orders and went back. 
 
 It began long ago with a Frenchman and an English- 
 man, two men whose names will live as long as pain is in 
 the world and after. They were Pasteur and Lister. 
 The trouble before them was that, although the discovery 
 of chloroform had made surgery easier, wounds still 
 became inflamed, and the death-rate was so high, even 
 after successful operations, that surgeons were often afraid 
 to operate. Something still there was, invisible and 
 unknown, that baffled the human brain. It was Pasteur's 
 discovery that opened up the way for Lister. Pasteur 
 had found that microbes could cause fermentation, and 
 Lister imagined that the inflammation of a wound might 
 be a fermentation caused by microbes. If only he could 
 keep these things away, if only he could drive back from 
 a wound this countless host of unseen things that keep 
 company with man throughout the earth then, Lister 
 thought, he might arrest the poisoning of the wound 
 before it was too late to save the life.
 
 WHAT THE WORLD FOUND OUT 299 
 
 He was right. He stood by an open wound and found 
 the procession of death sweeping in, and he held it back. 
 He poisoned it. Carbolic acid opposes sepsis, or putre- 
 faction, and so Lister called it antiseptic, and with this 
 antiseptic he killed the microbes as they gathered round 
 the wound. A new sentinel had arisen at every door that 
 opened into the temple of Life, and Lister worked like 
 the giant that he was to spread this beneficent power 
 throughout the world. He told his pupils to act as if the 
 surface of everything about them were covered with wet 
 paint. They were to touch nothing until a shower of 
 antiseptic had fallen over it. 
 
 His methods changed as time went on, but the end 
 was always the same. It is all in the Bible, which once 
 more had come to guide and guard the destinies of men. 
 Wash you, make you clean, says Listerism, and that is all it 
 says. But the cleanliness of surgery is not like the wash- 
 ing of hands. A great surgeon once said that if he washed 
 his hands in hot water he would call them clean, but if 
 he thrust his hands in the fire he would call them surgically 
 clean. Lord Lister found an unclean thing and purified 
 it as by fire. 
 
 All that began in 1868, over half a century ago, 
 and through all these years it has been transforming 
 surgery, so that Listerism and antiseptics between them 
 have made perhaps the greatest contributions to human 
 happiness that have ever come within the range of 
 consciousness. 
 
 There is no difference between the world as we know 
 it and the world as Shakespeare and Shelley knew it that 
 is nearly so vital to mankind as the difference due to these 
 two things. Nothing seems more simple now than either
 
 300 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 of them, but that is the way with great events they are 
 all so simple when they happen. 
 
 There are two things about it all that are astonishing. 
 One is the wonderful change that was wrought in so simple 
 a way, and the other is the slowness with which the world 
 adapted itself to the change. Listerism came just in 
 time for the last great war in Europe, yet neither the 
 French nor the German Army made much use of the new 
 knowledge that would have saved the lives of their men 
 in thousands; and it remained for the Government of 
 Japan to teach Europe how to apply its knowledge. 
 
 Japan had learned of Europe, and she astonished her 
 tutor by acting as if she really believed that knowledge is 
 power. There never had been a war with so little typhoid, 
 so little dysentery, so few deaths from wounds, as in the 
 Japanese Army. In a Japanese army of 75,000 men there 
 were only 66 typhoid cases in six months. Before a naval 
 engagement the sailors of Japan were compelled to take 
 carbolic baths and put on sterilised underclothing. They 
 went into battle, that is to say, encased in poison-proof 
 armour. A bullet flying through the air at a tremendous 
 speed is sterilised by heat, and a Russian bullet striking 
 a Japanese sailor reached him under the same conditions 
 as Lord Lister's knife would have done it entered his 
 body by a door through which no microbes could follow it. 
 Russia went to war in those days with vodka on her side ; 
 Japan went to war with science on her side, and there was 
 only one end possible to a war like that. Japan had 
 learned her lesson well; never had Listerism been prac- 
 tised on so wide a scale, and Sir Frederick Treves, who 
 saw what happened with his own eyes, declared that 
 Russia had been beaten by an English Quaker.
 
 WHAT THE WORLD FOUND OUT 301 
 
 So science came into its own ; so Europe saw at work 
 in Asia the knowledge that men had gathered by half a 
 century of toiling and searching in the laboratories of 
 England and France. There was no longer any doubt 
 as to the value of science in war. Science, which our 
 Government had treated like a niggard, could save men's 
 lives in thousands and in tens of thousands, and at last 
 the Governments knew it. The War Offices and the 
 Admiralties knew it, and so it came about that, for the 
 first time in the history of war, a British army was armed 
 against its greatest foe. It was science that armed it 
 armed it so well that, with the biggest British army ever 
 seen on the field of war, the cases of disease were often 
 less than in time of peace. There was no great plague 
 in the West. For the first time in war disease was kept 
 in check, and there stands to the credit of science stupend- 
 ous conquests that can only be compared in a state of 
 war with the conquest of cancer or consumption in a state 
 of peace. 
 
 How many people in Little Treasure Island know that 
 science makes our soldiers typhoid-proof and cholera- 
 proof and tetanus-proof? These three enemies are now 
 beaten for all time. The prick of a needle and a little 
 discomfort guard the soldier from the danger of typhoid 
 fever; tetanus, for centuries one of the most dreaded 
 human ills, was abolished in the first few months of the 
 war; and early in 1915 a man went out from London to 
 Galicia, found some germs of cholera there, put them in 
 a tube, and took them to laboratories behind the firing- 
 line, where vaccines were prepared from them to deal 
 with cases of cholera that might have led to terrible 
 catastrophes. They are three immense achievements,
 
 302 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 comparable with discoveries that have made men's names 
 immortal, but they are only three of many great accom- 
 plishments on the peaceful side of the war. 
 
 Science, the science that British Governments have so 
 long scorned and starved, paid the nation back a million- 
 fold in those five years. For every shilling we gave it, 
 science gave us back the precious lives of men; in one 
 little hospital where only severe cases were taken, all but 
 forty in over a thousand men were saved. It would be a 
 poor enough reward if there could be, now that those 
 dark days are over, a tax for Science of one penny for 
 every pound of the income of the British Empire. With 
 that, Science could transform the world. 
 
 Europe is falling to pieces. The great institutions 
 set up by long years of toil are breaking down, and the 
 spectacle of crumbling thrones and ruined peoples and 
 dishonoured kings is too deep for words or tears. But it 
 is not all loss, this tragedy of Europe. The old world is 
 passing, and a new life will be built up on its ashes. The 
 great brotherhood of Europe will be a fact and not a 
 dream. 
 
 It is something that out of the Great War should 
 come one great foundation-stone for this new age to be. 
 If we can drive back disease in war we can drive back 
 disease in peace; and the nations that have seen the 
 wondrous things that science wrought in France will not 
 be willing, in the years to come, to let their people die when 
 they might live. The greatest victory of the Great War 
 was the victory of Life on the field of Death, and no 
 man can say how many precious lives will be saved in 
 the future by these new powers that Science found on 
 Europe's stricken field.
 
 A MESSAGE FROM MARS 
 
 Borne on the wings of Imagination 
 at the dawn of the New Year 1910 
 
 A LONG time it seems since we heard from you, dear 
 neighbour Earth; twice Mars has been on her journey 
 round the sun since there came to us from the depths of 
 your world the cry that your civilisation was breaking 
 down, that war was creeping on, that the treasure and 
 glory of a thousand years were overthrown. 
 
 And all through these two years of ours four years 
 they have been with you the instruments of science 
 that reach around our world have brought strange stir- 
 rings from your Earth. Dark shadows we have seen, 
 perhaps of those vast moving masses of mankind upon 
 your battlefields; far distant rumblings has the ether 
 brought to us of the great artilleries of Earth ; and those 
 of our wise men who for a thousand years have peered 
 into the throbbing heart of space, and sent their signals 
 out into infinity, have felt strange beatings in the heart 
 of matter and read strange signs that seem to portend woe. 
 
 And one or two there are among our seers who read 
 in these signs the fear that your Earth is breaking up, 
 that all the powers Life has built up there are crashing 
 toward some dread catastrophe. These signs, they say, 
 are failing now, and all is quieter after these past years. 
 What is it, O people, that has come to an end ? What is it 
 
 303
 
 304 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 we should gather from this sudden quiet about Earth ? 
 Is it, indeed, that a calamity has overwhelmed you, or 
 is it that your race has gripped and overthrown its foe ? 
 
 Ages have passed since Mars stood on the abyss of war. 
 Far back the early records of our Martians tell how men 
 would fight with beasts, and then at last how men would 
 fight with men, but as time passed, as men explored our 
 planet, and settled down in cities, and fathomed the 
 mysteries of natural law, and created great engines of 
 power, they spent their strength in these things and ceased 
 to fight. For war, you must know, had lost the chivalry 
 of ancient days. 
 
 The appeal of the natural power of one man against 
 another, or the pitting of the shrewdness of a man against 
 the cunning of some creature of the wild, has in it some- 
 thing we can still admire in Mars; but when men took a 
 piece of matter and made it throb with power so that it 
 almost seemed to be alive, when a man could hide behind 
 a piece of matter and kill another man far away, we lost 
 all pride in war, and there seemed something mean in it 
 for most of us for, you see, there never could be justice 
 in war when battles were won by those who had the heaviest 
 weight of metal or the biggest guns. There would be a 
 little people sometimes who wished to be peaceful and free, 
 who did no harm to any one, but tilled the ground and 
 educated their children and lived in happiness and use- 
 fulness; and suddenly a mighty people would come with 
 scientific powers to make war on these, coveting their land 
 and caring nothing for their virtues. We saw that a little 
 people in the right and a mighty people in the wrong 
 could never reach justice by war, and without justice 
 there could be no^ peace.
 
 * 
 
 PETER PAN. THE SPIRIT OF ETERNAL YOUTH, AT HOME TO HIS FRIENDS NEAR THE FIVE 
 PONDS IN KENSINGTON GARDENS FROM 5 TO 8.45 
 
 [Ste Pa* 175
 
 THE SOLDIER WAS THE SENTINEL OF EUROPE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS 
 
 From the painting by Meitsonnier. reproduced from a photograph by W.A. Mansell & Company 
 
 (Stt Pagt 199
 
 305 
 I 
 
 And so we put arf end long, long ago to that practice 
 
 of physical war which had grown with time into a great 
 system of scientific killing. It had become destruction 
 without reason. It was madness. Every day and every 
 hour the precious lives of men were flung away and were 
 lost to Mars. We would train up a man in our universi- 
 ties and workshops, we would train his brain in complex 
 sciences, so that his life became a service to the whole 
 of Mars, and then we would send him to war to be blown 
 to atoms by a gun. I could tell you of hundreds of such 
 men, who had in their hands the secrets of untold benefit 
 for our people. 
 
 There were chemists who would have given us new 
 sources of food, who would fertilise our fields so that 
 our harvests yielded more and more precious food. There 
 were engineers who would give us machines that would 
 save the labour of millions and set men free for nobler 
 things. There were inventors who were planning new 
 instruments by which Mars would have soon controlled the 
 weather. There were discoverers who peered into matter 
 and brought out its secrets, and seemed to be knocking 
 at the very door through which Life comes. There were 
 surgeons who could take a poor idiot child and touch its 
 brain and save it. There were artists with the beauty 
 of heaven itself in their souls. There were poets whose 
 songs are sung all over Mars. There were musicians 
 whose melodies stirred thoughts too deep for tears. 
 
 They were the flower of our manhood, and suddenly war 
 would come and take them . It would pick them up and put 
 them on a battlefield, and some mechanical thing would 
 raise its head and swing aloft and blow them into dust. 
 So long ago is all that now that it seems incredible it
 
 306 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 should have been. Is Earth still in that senseless grip of 
 war? 
 
 Through great instruments erected on our mountain 
 peaks we look across space and see a thousand million 
 stars, but they are far away, so that their light does not 
 reach us for hundreds of years. Not even yet, after 
 thousands of years of science and invention, do we under- 
 stand the stars, but Earth is not so very far away. You 
 pay your tribute to our sun ; you sweep the heavens with 
 our family of worlds ; we pass each other by as neighbours 
 in our corner of the boundless universe. You are almost 
 our next-of-kin, and it is more to us that some calamity 
 should overtake your Earth than that a star should perish. 
 
 The Earth is full of life and power; she marches in 
 the path of Mars to her eternal destinies, though what 
 they are she cannot know. How small an affair is Earth 
 among these myriad rolling worlds ! But a speck she is as 
 we look at her, a bit of light like a candle burning across 
 a million miles of dark. Have you heard on Earth of 
 those worlds on worlds that lie beyond, of the everlasting 
 powers of God that roll and roll into infinity ? Have you 
 dreamed that somehow they are one with us and we with 
 them, links in the chain that binds a million million worlds 
 and holds them in their path ? 
 
 For what great purpose are you there, on that spot 
 of light up in our sky ? Ah ! Men have asked the same 
 of Mars a million years, and they are asking still. We 
 do not know. We can but hold our planet as a sacred 
 trust for some mysterious purpose in the mind of God. 
 But what a treachery is war, what a murderer of brothers, 
 what a plunderer of Nature it is as if a man should put 
 his pocket first and his planet last 1 Strange that there
 
 A MESSAGE FROM MARS 307 
 
 should be men with all our human powers who think 
 nothing of the wonder of our life and the marvels of our 
 world. We had such men as these on Mars. They would 
 stand up for themselves alone, whether right or wrong, 
 and then it came to be " My family, right or wrong," and 
 then " My country, right or wrong," and out of all these 
 doctrines war would spring. It was not till we remem- 
 bered that we were a planet that we got rid of it, and 
 now there is no man on Mars who does not seek the interest 
 of the planet first. Wrong done to one is done to all, 
 and we have long agreed on Mars that, should any enemy 
 appear, should a man pursue any selfish purpose, he shall 
 be denied the use of natural instruments of power. The 
 gates of science shall be closed to him, for in Mars we hold 
 science in trust, and knowledge for the good of all. 
 
 How many things there are that hold us all together, 
 and how few things there are worth quarrelling about 1 
 We linked ourselves together long ago in Mars in one 
 great League of Peoples, bound in common bonds. We 
 fixed one language for all our planet, though men still 
 speak their own as well, when and where they please. 
 We made travel free from end to end of Mars, so that our 
 people journey where they will. Our commerce runs 
 wherever it can go, and nothing says it nay. Science is 
 open to all, and knows no boundaries. Inventions and 
 ideas are free for all. Art and music and books go every- 
 where like the sun. 
 
 The whole of our wide planet has one code of laws, 
 with liberty for every man who leads a useful life and lives 
 in honour with his neighbour. The planet has one set of 
 common schools, and all through Mars the boys and girls 
 are taught to love God and honour men, to be worthy of
 
 308 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 the noble gift of life, to seek knowledge and pursue it 
 for the good of Mars. The planet has a common standard 
 of health, and the welfare of each is the interest of all. 
 The appearance of a single case of foul disease on Mars 
 would alarm and terrify our people, and all the energies 
 of Mars would be harnessed to destroy it. A pure and 
 healthy life within the reach of all, the pleasures of art 
 and music within the lives of all, useful work available 
 for all, the gates of knowledge open to all, justice assured 
 for all such is the common security of Mars. 
 
 It must be so, and now that war has gone there reigns 
 on Mars a peace that passes all understanding. The 
 common life grows more and more, the little interests 
 pass away. We are one and indivisible. We are a race 
 of planet patriots brothers, comrades, and neighbours. 
 Our conflicts with each other are behind us; our fighting 
 henceforward is on behalf of all. We contest with the 
 elements; we wrestle with natural powers to harness 
 them to our well-being. If war was a great world busi- 
 ness so must peace be. Something there is in a man 
 belonging to the soul of all mankind. It is the universal 
 spirit of man, and it cannot live in conflict with itself. 
 It must have peace to flourish and grow strong in. 
 
 Your Earth has been out on a wild and angry night; 
 let it stand still and look at Nature, silently moving on. 
 Think of the mighty power the ether holds, and it is 
 everywhere, and free to all. Think of what light and heat 
 and air can do, and all mankind is rich in them. Think 
 of that power which will send a message anywhere in 
 the twinkling of an eye ; it exists on every inch of your 
 planet. You are waking up on Earth, you are coming 
 after us, you will arrive where Mars already stands.
 
 A MESSAGE FROM MARS 309 
 
 Your world is growing smaller as science draws its parts 
 together ; let your mind grow bigger as science binds your 
 interests in one. We are one in our interests and one in 
 our dreams; above all, we are one when we look up into 
 the stars at 
 
 The world above man's head to let him see 
 How boundless might his soul's horizons be. 
 
 There are, be sure, incalculable forces awakening on 
 Earth powers that will work for you if you will use 
 them; but you must control them or they will control 
 you, and sweep you to your doom. The solemn forces that 
 have brought you thus far will lead you to the end, but 
 the universe has no room for war between its children. 
 Bind yourselves in a Covenant of Nations, sealed with the 
 seal of the planet, and march together to your destinies. 
 Nature and all her powers are on your side, but Nature 
 expects that, in this great hour of the Earth, each one 
 will do his duty. 
 
 Follow her, set your faces to the Sun, and He who has 
 brought you thus far will lead you farther yet.
 
 ALL'S WELL 
 
 BEHIND us lies the Great Adventure; before us lies 
 the Better Land. 
 
 For ever we shall remember those years those five 
 years of the life of the Island. We who have lived through 
 them have lived through the greatest years that Time 
 has ever known. 
 
 Five times round the sun, five years of the life of the 
 earth ! Sit and look in the fire, and think what it 
 means. 
 
 Five years of winter snows, of daffodils and roses, of 
 autumn leaves; five years of wind and rain and sun, 
 of storms and quiet nights, of silver moons ; five years of 
 growing trees and rolling seas; five years of little lives 
 coming into the world, five years of lives going out ; five 
 years of thinking and toiling and planning, of finding 
 out new things; five years of hope and prayer and faith. 
 
 Never have there been five years like these since man 
 began his journey on the earth. How high he has climbed I 
 How low he has fallen 1 He has spread his power through- 
 out the earth ; he has grasped at the secrets of Nature and 
 mastered them. Mystery after mystery that lies behind 
 Creation man has fathomed and unveiled. He has mag- 
 nified his powers and mocked at time and distance. 
 He has lifted himself up in majesty above all things, and 
 today the human race lies stricken, torn to pieces by the 
 civilisation it was so proud of. Man in these five years 
 
 810
 
 ALL'S WELL 311 
 
 has fallen from the height of power to grovel in holes 
 like the beasts of the field. 
 
 We saw a hundred things, on these five journeys 
 round the sun, that history will hardly believe. 
 
 We saw the German Emperor walk out of civilisation 
 and bring his nation with him. We saw the fall of proud 
 thrones and ancient empires. We saw the whole continent 
 of Europe in the grip of barbarism and death. 
 
 We saw nation after nation first holding aloof from all 
 this terror, dreading to be drawn into the maelstrom of 
 death, yet coming in at last, unable to stand as spectators 
 with Liberty trembling in Europe and civilisation in peril 
 throughout the earth. 
 
 We saw the everlasting spirit of man rise, now in a boy 
 like Jack Cornwell, now in a woman like Edith Cavell, 
 now in a man like Captain Fryatt, and all the earth over, 
 in multitudes that no man can number, to vindicate the 
 right of all mankind to the enjoyment of this world. 
 
 We saw the flag of Freedom wave over Calvary and 
 Bethlehem and the Garden of Eden. We saw the spirit 
 of Joan of Arc in France again. We saw America give up 
 for a few red years and we hope for ever her isolation, 
 her years of abundance and peace, to send her hosts across 
 3000 miles of sea to make Europe safe to live in. 
 
 We have seen the world in the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death. We have seen mankind knit in deep sorrow, the 
 mothers of all nations weeping for their sons, yet vowing 
 that their sacrifice shall not have been in vain. We have 
 seen the dark days of despair ; we have suffered defeat on 
 defeat; but we have seen the powers of good gather 
 from the ends of the earth and grow mightier than the 
 powers of evil.
 
 312 LITTLE TREASURE ISLAND 
 
 We have seen the hope of the world kindled anew in a 
 grief that has brought together the myriad children of 
 men. We have seen the Vision Splendid, the light beyond 
 the gloom. We in this Island where Freedom dwells 
 have felt again the pride and power and honour of our 
 race. It was not for nothing that, before he died, the 
 great American Wilbur Wright gave the supreme work of 
 his brain as a free gift to Mother England ; it was not for 
 nothing that, before he died, the great Frenchman Rodin 
 gave the supreme work of his hand to England. We have 
 to be worthy of it all, of this love that thrills hearts 
 everywhere when the name of England sounds. 
 
 Once in those five years there came through space a 
 cry from the Antarctic, from men cut off from civilisation 
 since the war began, and the message rang out from the 
 ether : Is all well with the Old Land ? 
 
 The light is still dim, the night has been long, and the 
 road is hard, but we know in Whom we have believed, 
 and out to all the world, to men everywhere, living and 
 dying, we send the answer back that All is Well ! 
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD BT., 8.K. 1, AND BUNOAY, SUFFOLK.