ho tidied the Celt so tattered and torn,"

and so on, back to the prehistoric Jack who built the long house of the
dead.

Our later subjections to the French, the Scots, the Dutch and the
Germans, who have in turn ruled our courts and fattened on their
favours, have not been so violent or so complete; but for some
centuries they depressed our people with a sense of humiliation, and
they have left their mark upon our national character and language.
Indeed, our language is a synopsis of conquests, a stratification of
subjections. We can hardly speak a sentence without recording a certain
number of the subject races from which we have sprung. The only one ever
left out is the British, and that survives in the names of our most
beautiful rivers and mountains. It is true that all of our conquerors
have come to stay--all with the one exception of Rome. We have never
formed part of a distant and foreign empire except the Roman. Even our
Norman invaders soon regarded our country as the centre of their power
and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our
interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race,
and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain
perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed,
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Perhaps also
for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and
contrite heart, lest we forget our history--lest we forget.

We pray in contrite humility to remember, but we have forgotten. In
speaking of Finland's loss of liberty, Madame Malmberg, the Finnish
patriot, once said that in old days, when their liberties seemed secure,
the Finns felt no sympathy with other nationalities--the Poles, the
Georgians, or the Russians themselves--struggling to be free. They did
not know what it was to be a subject race. They could not realise the
degrading loss of nationality. They were soon to learn, and they know
now. We have not learned. We have forgotten our lesson. That is why we
remain so indifferent to the cry of freedom, and to the suppression of
nationality all over the world.

Let us for a moment imagine that something terrible has happened; that
our statesmen have at last got their addition sums in Dreadnoughts
right, and have learned by hard experience that we have less than two to
one and therefore are wiped from the seas; or that our august Russian
ally, using Finland as a base,