THE TRAFALGAR CELEBRATION.
WITH surprising and yet eminently characteristic casualness, the fellow-countrymen of Nelson have just taken to decking his statue or visiting his tomb on the anniversary of his triumphant death. There is nothing on the face of it very particular about a ninetieth anniversary ; but it is never too late to mend, and if Trafalgar Day is to be celebrated on general grounds in future, it was certainly better to begin this year than next year. There is, indeed, another possible point of view. One might hold—and it may conceivably be held even by some friends and members of the Navy League itself, whose offering of a laurel-wreath was conspicuous in Trafalgar Square on October 21st—that the right to pay ornamental tributes to a hero's memory can only be earned by strict obedience to the lessons of his life ; and that there- fore both the British nation, and the League who are trying—but so far with only imperfect success— to convert it to sound views about the conditions of the command of the sea, ought to wait humbly until they can claim to be acting effectively in Nelson's spirit before laying wreaths at the foot of his monument. The prevail- ing and more reasonable opinion, however, as we think, will be that the more impressively and regularly Nelson's crowning achievement is brought before the general public, the more surely and rapidly will the country become alive to the imperative duty of putting our Admirals in a position, if the need should arise, to repeat his triumphs. But assuming that the casual and fragmentary celebration of Monday last was good so far as it went, another question presents itself,—Why does the instinct for national cele- brations appear so weak and intermittent in us as com- pared with other nations? As to the fact there can be no dispute. We have only to look at France, Germany, and Italy, or even at our kinsmen across the Atlantic, to assure ourselves that it is so. The French have their Republic Day, and there can be no doubt that they would have many military festivals but for the sense that the memory of 1870-71 would cast a shadow over the brightness of any such occasions. The Germans, under the auspices of their present "War-Lord," always seem to be rejoicing over some victory. They even overdo it, we are inclined to think. Of our Italian friends, in view of a recent im- portant function in Rome, there is no need to speak. The lustre of the Fourth of July has paled but little, though the American Republic is well into the second century of its great and potent life. We English sometimes bestir ourselves, and collect subscriptions, in connection with the tercentenary, or it may be the quincentenary, of the school at which we were brought up, and now and then spasmodic efforts are made to show that some of us realise that it is a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago to-day since some great man of letters and of English blood was born or died. But to celebrations of the anni- versaries or other recurrences of dates otherwise famous in our island-story we seem indifferent, not to say averse.
We have, as a nation, deliberately ceased to return thanks in connection with the deliverance of King James I. and the Houses of Parliament from Gunpowder Treason, and most of us look with undisguised impatience upon the lingering celebration of that event by the youth of the country. Similarly, we have put aside all public expressions of gratitude on account of the Restoration of King Charles IL, or of the arrival of King William III.; and most Unionists among us have difficulty in dissembling, even if in Ulster, our annoyance at the continued celebration of such events as the raising of the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne. On all these cases it may be said, with more or less truth or plausibility, that the celebrations referred to have been abandoned or have fallen into disrepute, because they were rather sectional than national, and that it is highly to our credit that we should have evinced, as a nation, the tender regard for the feelings even sometimes of comparatively small minorities which is illustrated in the total suppression or extensive discountenancing of the festivals in question. But the general inquiry cannot be cleared away by the line of remark just indicated. There have been great events in English history over which every Englishman at the time rejoiced, and of which every Englishman now is proud to think—events which refleated the greatest possible glory upon the Englishmen con- cerned in them, and which decisively affected for good the course of our national affairs. Of these events, the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar are shining examples ; but the latter is, from every point of view, the more brilliant of the two, for in the first place there can be no question of the division of the glory of the issue between the British and any other combatants ; and in the second place, the safety and room for Imperial expansion which Nelson secured for us would have remained even if Blucher had not arrived, and the Duke of Wellington had been overwhelmed. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if any other nation in Europe had won such a victory as Trafalgar, it would celebrate it to the end of time, or at any rate until its memory had been clouded by intervening defeat. What, then, is the reason why not only has Waterloo Day been kept in a very partial fashion, and on the whole with diminishing fervour, bat Trafalgar Day has not been kept at all ? The answer is doubtless complex. In so far as there ever was any strong feeling in favour of celebrating Trafalgar and Waterloo in a manner worthy of their im- portance and of the lustre they reflect on British arms, that feeling must have been checked, first, by the fact that the French, over whom we triumphed on both occa- sions, were placed after Waterloo under a dynasty and form of government which we and our allies practically imposed upon them, and that the recurrence of great rejoicings here over British victories might have seemed gratuitously injurious to the position of the new settlement ; and secondly, by the fact of the subse- quent affiance of the French, when Bonapartism. re- vived, with us against Russia. We do not believe, however, that it ever cost very many Englishmen any serious sacrifice to forego indulgence in celebra- tions of the triumphs of the Great War. We think so because, in our opinion, the great Napoleon had hold of a very large part of the truth when he called us a nation of shopkeepers. Shopkeepers, no doubt, with high Imperial instincts,—almost OA proud, man for man, on the Imperial side, as those great ruhng traders, the Medici ; but still shopkeepers. And the truth of the saying applies almost as much to our aristocracy as to our commercial classes. In other words, the English are a practical, not an imaginative, race. The average Englishman's feeling about the celebration of a victory that is at all remote in point of time, is something of this kind; "What is the good of keeping it up ? We got what we wanted. It won't make that gain any surer to make speeches and walk in processions now. Our men
will fight just as well again, when required, if we don't celebrate these old victories, as if we do. It only puts up the backs of our old enemies if we have such festivities, which is neither very noble of us, nor is it good. business. Moreover, we are really too busy to spend time in keeping the anniversaries of our victories. If we once began that kind of thing, we might have as many holi- days as there are Roman Catholic saints' days, and we know what that would mean for trade." There is a good deal to be said for the Imperial shop- keeper's point of view, and it is by no means altogether unworthy of the people of a great nation. For the most part, we should be quite content to see it govern our national practice. But we should make an exception in the case of Trafalgar. The command of the sea is abso- lutely vital to our Imperial security, and even to our national existence, and aids to the dull British imagina- tion in that connection cannot wisely be dispensed with. They need not be administered in a provocative manner, but they do need to be administered somehow. A Nelson cult is at least as safe and dignified a method of meeting this requirement as the recurrence of sensational news- paper campaigns on the subject of our naval decadence.
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