In the crisis of 1940 our leaders continually reminded us of those resources in the past which can be drawn upon to fortify a nation at war. While pl… - Herbert Butterfield

It is not clear that continental countries, which have had their revolutions, followed by counter-revolutions, have greatly improved on the English rate of progress, in spite of what they paid in havoc and bloodshed precisely for the sake of speed.

Let us praise, not revolution and war, but man's reconciling mind which acts the good fairy over the worst that human wilfulness may have decreed—which begins to play providence upon the past almost as soon as it has happened, redeeming the mistakes, changing evil into good and turning necessity into opportunity. Let us praise man’s reconciling mind—in other words, the wisdom of the whigs, who turned the disasters of our 17th-century Civil War into reflection and experience; and who, precisely because they were lovers of liberty, checked their wantonness and decreed: "This at least shall never happen again".

Some nations have had a broken and tragic past. Others are new or have only recently arisen after a long submergence. Some have been torn by a terrible breach between past and present—a breach which, though it happened long ago, they have never been able to heal and overcome. We in England have been fortunate and we must remember our good fortune, for we have actually drawn strength from the continuity of our history. We have been wise, for we have taken care of the processes which serve to knit the past and the present together; and when great rifts have occurred—in the Reformation or the Civil Wars, for example—a succeeding generation has done its best to play providence upon the tears and rents that have been made in the fabric of our history. Englishmen in the after-period have actually thrown back the needle, seeking by a thousand little stitches to join the present with the past once more. So we are a country of traditions and there remains a living continuity in our history.