The historical development of England is based upon the fact that her frontiers against Europe are drawn by Nature, and cannot be the subject of dispute; that she is a unit sufficiently small for coherent government to have been established and maintained even under very primitive conditions; that since 1066 she has never suffered serious invasion; that no big modern armies have succeeded her feudal levies; and that her senior service is the navy, with which foreign trade is closely connected. In short, a great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact that Great Britain is an island.

For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.

Even more striking than England's unity has been the freedom of individual choice on which it has been based. Because the Channel lay between her and the continent, her people were able to develop a form of government in which power, instead of being centralised in a few hands, was distributed in many. Not being threatened across a land frontier, they had no need to entrust their rulers with standing military forces or despotic rights over private liberties. Authority normally was exercised only after those subject to it had had an opportunity to make their views known. From the Saxon Witenagemot to the twentieth century Parliament, from the village hustings and manor court to the trade union lodge and parish council, there was nearly always some working machinery in England by which those in authority could test the opinion of those over whom authority had to be exercised. Government was conducted subject to the right of the governed to criticise and, within lawful limits, to oppose. "His Majesty's Opposition" is the most characteristic and certainly the most original of English contributions to politics.

English government has a special claim to be studied. It developed in comparative freedom from outside interference, producing a curious blend of decentralized and popular freedom with strong, efficient, and centralized administration.

England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England's differ profoundly from those of the continentals.

Look at England, whose mighty power is now felt, and for centuries has been felt, all around the world. It is worthy of special remark, that precisely those parts of that proud island which have received the largest and most diversified populations, are to day the parts most distinguished for industry, enterprise, invention and general enlightenment. In Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland the boast is made of their pure blood, and that they were never conquered, but no man can contemplate them without wishing they had been conquered. They are far in the rear of every other part of the English realm in all the comforts and conveniences of life, as well as in mental and physical development. Neither law nor learning descends to us from the mountains of Wales or from the Highlands of Scotland. The ancient Briton, whom Julius Caesar would not have as a slave, is not to be compared with the round, burly, amplitudinous Englishman in many of his qualities of desirable manhood.

England is the country of the English... England is the stage on which the drama of English history was played and the setting within which the English became conscious of themselves as a people ... when politicians and preachers attempt to frighten and cajole the English into pretending away the distinction between themselves and people of other nations and other origins, they are engaged in undermining the foundation upon which democratic government by consent and peaceable civilised society in this country are supported ... those who at the end of the twentieth century wish to keep alive that consciousness of being English, which seemed so effortless and uncontroversial to our forefathers, will discover that they are called upon, if they take their purpose seriously, to confront the most arrogant and imposing prejudices of their time.

Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.... All is race, there is no other truth.

It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years.

England alone has a history in which ancient freedom has made its way through, and utilised all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty.

Because we in England have maintained the threads between past and present, we do not, like some younger states, have to go hunting for our own personalities. We do not have to set about the deliberate manufacture of a national consciousness, or to strain ourselves, like the Irish, in order to create a "nationalism" out of the broken fragments of tradition, out of the ruins of a tragic past. We do not have to go toiling to acquire on a slow hire-purchase system a tradition of our own. Then again—because our history is here and alive, giving meaning to the present, and because from it there emerges an increasing purpose, we know our way somewhat—know what we stand for in the present conflict, and what to have in mind in the leadership or government of an empire. We do not, like the modern Germans, flounder, looking for something to live for, as people without direction—plunging now towards one point of the compass and now to its opposite, hunting for a target anywhere. Above all, because we have kept continuity in spite of great changes, gathering up the past with us as we marched into the future, and waiting at times so that we could all move forward together as a nation, we have not been ravaged and destroyed by a tragic irredeemable cleavage within the state—a Tradition confronted by a Counter-Tradition as in the case of 19th- and 20th-century France.

The greatness of this country was attained not by teaching the message that one class of Englishmen must wed itself to a bitter antagonism against other classes of Englishmen, but was was rather founded on the doctrine that they were all English. All that was changed. They were to be class conscious. ... It means that we are to drive into that solidity of English life, which has secured our greatness, the poison of a belief that the interests of England require that there should be vital and eternal antagonism in her midst which prevents all Englishmen uniting for an all-English cause. In the old spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, when the Empire was still in the winning, as well as in the days of the Napoleonic Wars, we conquered by the force of a gallant and united nation. We did not march to battle under the Red Flag.

England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial…until about the middle of the last century, when a number of ingenious and inventive men, without apparent relation to each other, arose in various parts of the kingdom, succeeded in giving an immense impulse to all the branches of the national industry; the result of which has been a harvest of wealth and prosperity, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world.

But for all their nonsense and faction, the English were acquiring a new conception of the place of their country in the world, as the mistress of the Mediterranean, "the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe," to whom foreign Princes and peoples looked for help and justice not in vain. England was more than all she had been under Elizabeth, more than all she had been under Cromwell, for she was now a united nation with a fixed and free Constitution. Whig and Tory might bark and bicker, but they carried on the nation's work between them, because the blood-feud of sects and parties had been staunched by the compromise of the Revolution Settlement, which, by giving to England domestic peace, based more securely than on force, had opened to her the paths of greatness abroad.