Plus, of course, you don't get the cool illustrations.
That's the endpaper illustration. Good friends, and baaaaad enemies.
Posted on 10/18/2007 6:51:06 PM PDT by neverdem
Having devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy, I did what their author hoped and graduated to his much finer historical novels. The best of these, The White Company, appeared in 1890; it describes the recruitment and deployment of a detachment of Hampshire archers during the reign of King Edward III, a period that, as Arthur Conan Doyle phrased it, “constituted the greatest epoch in English History—an epoch when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in London.”
This book, it’s of interest to note, also influenced Dwight Eisenhower’s boyhood (I owe this information to the extraordinary Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley). For there came a time when this child of German-American parents also had to muster a considerable force from Hampshire headquarters, and launch them across the Channel in one of the greatest military interventions in history. Of course, on D-day, Eisenhower took care to have a French leader on his side (admittedly a turbulent and mutinous one), and Scottish regiments were as usual to the fore in the storming of the Atlantic Wall. But it’s funny how one somehow can thrill to the same tradition, whether it’s the medieval yeomen and bowmen of Anglo-Saxondom or the modern, mechanized, multinational coalition against fascism.
Doyle was only a few years from his first trip to the United States when he published The White Company, which he dedicated as follows: “To the hope of the future, the reunion of the English-speaking races, this little chronicle of our common ancestry is inscribed.” Around the same time, two other renowned figures—Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling—made similar pitches. Two monuments, the Rhodes scholarships and the poem “The White Man’s Burden,” still survive in American life...
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Nobody has thought that we were talking about a "race" as opposed to a "culture" - even Kipling didn't think that, despite what the critics say. Usually they've never actually read his work, just what other critics have said about it.
That said -- I agree with Hitchens on one point. The White Company is almost certainly Doyle's best book, it's a splendid story and brilliantly realized. Alleyne Edricson and Sam Aylward and John of Hordle are a great trio of English adventurers, and Sir Nigel Loring is the ideal parfit gentil knight. I have the old black-back Scribner's edition, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and you could do a lot worse than spending a day reading that one.
It's a beautiful idea, but Hitchens forgets the little matter of "multiculturalism" - read, unassimilating foreign Muslim immigration - into Britain, Australia, Canada, etc. The Muslim Trojan horse has to be addressed at some point, instead of being placated to the max at the expense of the indigenous Anglos, etc. With their birth rate, and total disrepect of the local dhimmis, it's not going to work as things stand now.
Bermuda as it’s headquarters? I don’t think so. Headquarters should be the district of columbia.
Interesting post. Thanks neverdem.
Well, that certainly would get things off to a rollicking start. The delegates would have to hit the ground running - literally. It definitely might change a few minds about gun control, since DC has very strict gun laws and the DC criminals are very grateful accordingly. Yes, that's definitely something to think about. Just think of the future editions of America's Most Wanted, and the police videotape shows.:D
First... I loved this article! It is an extremely important overview of history and social theory. I have two conflicting statements to make after reading it. Give me liberty or death!... and, God save the Queen!
Second... It opens the door to an analogy I've made in many social circles that elicited blank stares, long sips from wine glasses and timely subject shifts. I've always submitted this observation in pleasant company. Pleasant company has its limits. Indeed, it is an analogy better suited to FR.
NOW, Read this excerpt three or four times:
A glaring example of this disability is the EU’s utter failure to compose a viable constitution. Roberts correctly notes that “along with over two centuries of amendments the entire (readable and easily intelligible) U.S. Constitution can be printed out onto twelve pages of A4-sized paper; the (unreadable and impenetrably complicated) proposed European Constitution ran to 265.”
Did you read it at least three of four times? Well, that's what computer programmers do when they write code. There are many languages used to program a computer. Some languages are specialized. They were developed to do specific things. Other languages are used because they are more universal. From a business perspective, the best languages are taught in universities and are widely familiar to most (available for hire) programmers. But what any observer eventually realizes is that good code requires fewer lines than bad code... I'm going to repeat this reality for emphasis. Good code requires fewer lines than bad code! Users rarely consider the code that runs their applications, but it exists under the surface whether they realize it or not. The excerpt proves Europeans do elect officials capable of writing good governing code. Arguably Amercans don't either but we at least had "Founding Fathers" who could and did write good governing code!
What I just mentioned applies to Free Republic. Thank you Jim Rob and [Mr.] Admin Moderator. You have declared independence from other online applications and are doing well governing this relatively wild region of cyberspace.
To Hitchen's point, English is the language of the Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These are short, concise and accessible documents. That's what gives them traction in the world today. If we set our emotional attachment to English aside, all of the inherent meaning of these documents could be written in virtually any language created by the mind of mankind. FR is written in perl but it could just as easily been written in Java or PHP. In other words, humans could operate under the concepts developed by the Founding Fathers of the United States in Spanish, French, German, Farsi, Arabic or any other language for that matter... and the majority of its users wouldn't even realize they had adopted the British and American values they contain.
In conclusion, the human brain thinks in concepts and the human body act on orders from its brain. Concepts exist irrespective of the words used to express them. I think what Christopher is implying with this piece is a broad culture of success, which happens to be written in and applied in --- English. That's nothing like an historical or future empire founded on a fake impression of superiority derived from our sharing the English language. An Anglosphere Future is about the triumph of successful governing code over governing code that gets people killed, murdered and executed ad infinitum.
Cheers... to a better future based on concepts all of us can agree on, regardless of the language they are written in --- this applies to future computer applications as well as future governments...
[Courtesy of Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org)]
Well said. Thanks.
Thanks for the link. My computer is 7 years old. I’m not up to date with this stuff. I don’t think I have much room on the computer. What link should I choose?
Cheers
Plus, of course, you don't get the cool illustrations.
That's the endpaper illustration. Good friends, and baaaaad enemies.
[A 3.5 inch diskette for your A drive will store just under 1.5 megabytes, if you want to go that route. A writable CD will store 600-700 megabytes, if you want to grab a lot of old literature off Gutenberg]
Splendid painter in every way, much better than ANY of his kids. No need to demean him (or Norman Rockwell for that matter) by calling him an "illustrator" -- although he did that beautifully too. We're all better off for having Wyeth and his teacher Howard Pyle illustrating our books!
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