When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, what will the sum of its achievement be?  What will it leave of things visible?  Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation of the Victorian period?  Will a great constellation of artists redeem the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery?  Will our literature escape at last from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolish cerebrations of university “characters” and eminent politicians at leisure, and our starved science find scope and resources adequate to its gigantic needs?  Will our universities, our teaching, our national training, our public services, gain a new health from the reviving vigour of the national brain?  Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shall we, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation of some ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on, the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender or financial “scientist,” and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying, relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry of Germany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and material leadership of the world?

The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins and symbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off of epochs.  We are brought to weigh one generation against another, to reckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase.  What lies before us in the next decades?  Is England going on to fresh achievements, to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she falling into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?

The answer to that depends upon ourselves.  Have we pride enough to attempt still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom and the quality?  Or are we just the children of Good Luck, who are being found out?

Some years ago our present King exhorted this island to “wake up” in one of the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seaman assures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we are now

  “Free of the snare of slumber’s silken bands,”

though I have not myself observed it.  It is interesting to ask, Is England really waking up? and if she is, what sort of awakening is she likely to have?

It is possible, of course, to wake up in various different ways.  There is the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy, unresting, planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of a still half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs his toe in his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarum clock in a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving.  All