When men parted first from their Christianity and then from their deism, the deification of the state was bound to be achieved in a comparatively sho… - Herbert Butterfield

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.

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 plunging into a sea of changes, novelties and inventions, England resumed contact with her traditions and threw out ropes to the preceding generations, as though in time of danger it was a good thing not to lose touch with the rest of the convoy.

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".