A view of Cheapside and Mansion House in London, photographed in about 1902. Monypenny saw Britain as a great crossroads, a cosmopolitan meeting-place and open thoroughfare for people of all kinds, something which gave our society breadth and balance. Other nations of Europe, he felt, tended to be preoccupied either with jealously protecting their own national identity, or else with imposing it on the unwilling.
Introduction
William Monypenny, a journalist with the Johannesburg ‘Star’ and the London ‘Times’, held that Britain had a responsibility to remain a country at the crossroads, aloof from the ideological extremism of her European neighbours, steadied and balanced by truly global ties of family, trade and culture.
HISTORICALLY, England has for many centuries played the same part of the regulating Power in the microcosm of Europe. Freed by her isolated position and her interests oversea from the temptation to aggression in Europe on her own account, she has over and over again thrown her weight decisively into the scale against the aggression of any other Power that had grown dangerously strong. Philip II, Louis XIV, and Napoleon, all alike, found England barring the way to a European domination;* and it has almost become a tradition in Europe that, when any Power threatens the independence of the others, the weaker States gather round England.
A distinguished French journalist, writing in a French paper for the benefit of his countrymen, not long ago described the Englishman as ‘the most perfect type of civilized humanity in this twentieth century.’ Testimony such as this, if it is used, not to minister to national vanity, but to deepen the sense of national responsibility, need not be ignored.
On Philip II of Spain, see The Spanish Armada; on Louis XIV of France, see The War of the Spanish Succession; and on Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France, see posts tagged Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) (21).
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