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Introduction
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
I submit that such a nightmare of national experiences would have driven an unmixed race to the edge of lunacy. But the Englishman is like a built-up gun barrel, all one temper though welded of many different materials,* and he has strong powers of resistance. Roman,* Dane,* Norman,* Papist,* Cromwellian,* Stuart,* Hollander,* Hanoverian,* Upper Class, Middle Class,* Democracy,* each in turn through a thousand years experimented on him and tried to make him to their own liking.* He met them each in turn with a large silent toleration, which each in turn mistook for native stupidity. He gave them each in turn a fair trial and, when he had finished with them, an equally fair dismissal. As an additional safeguard he devised for himself a social system in watertight compartments, so arranged that neither the waters of popular emotion nor the fires of private revenge could sweep his ship of State from end to end.*
* At Christmas in 1940, twenty years after Kipling gave this speech, actor Leslie Howard gave another urging the public to defend Britain against Nazi Germany, in which he too drew attention to our country’s complex racial and cultural background: see Britain’s Destiny.
* The Romans ruled the indigenous British from 43 to 410. After they abandoned the Province, Angles, Jutes and Saxons swarmed over the North Sea from what is now Denmark and Germany; they settled here, and became known as the English.
* The Vikings began serious raids on the English in the 9th century, and their kings ruled England from 1016 to 1042.
* The Normans came from Normandy on northern France in 1066, led by William the Conqueror, and subjugated English people and English law to their French ways with some violence.
* The Church of Rome battled with English kings over the Pope’s claim of supremacy over the Crown until the Act of Supremacy (1534, restored 1559), by which Parliament declared that the Church of Rome had no jurisdiction in England.
* In 1649, military leader Oliver Cromwell engineered the execution of King Charles I, and imposed a bleak Swiss Protestant religion and a dictatorship on England.
* The Stuarts were a Scottish royal house; the first to rule England was James VI and I in 1603; Charles I was his son.
* James II, son of Charles I, so flirted with Roman power again that in 1688 Parliament brought over William of Orange, a Protestant prince from Holland who was descended from James I, to rule in James’s stead.
* In 1714, George, Elector of Hanover, was brought over from Germany to become King, as he was the next Protestant in the royal line of succession.
* The relentless rise of the middle class, displacing the aristocracy as the leaders of government, was a consequence of commerce and the industrial revolution from the eighteenth century onwards.
* Governance became increasingly democratic with the expansion of the franchise from 1832, resulting in universal suffrage in 1928.
* This nautical simile was a favourite of the Marquess of Halifax (1633-1695): see Mistress Liberty.
Précis
Rudyard Kipling told the Royal Society of St George in 1920 that however badly the English had been treated by a catalogue of wretched governors from the Romans to the present day, we managed to survive because we are not pure-bred, but a hardy race of many fathers, and because our class system prevents hysteria seizing the whole country at once. (61 / 60 words)
Rudyard Kipling told the Royal Society of St George in 1920 that however badly the English had been treated by a catalogue of wretched governors from the Romans to the present day, we managed to survive because we are not pure-bred, but a hardy race of many fathers, and because our class system prevents hysteria seizing the whole country at once.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: despite, just, must, or, otherwise, since, unless, until.
Word Games
Sevens Based on this passage
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Variations: 1.expand your answer to exactly fourteen words. 2.expand your answer further, to exactly twenty-one words. 3.include one of the following words in your answer: if, but, despite, because, (al)though, unless.
Jigsaws Based on this passage
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
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