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 perso… - Herbert Butterfield

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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.