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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 9 (February 25, 1927)

England

England.

And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses; through the ear, through the eye and through certain imperishable scents. I will tell you what they are, and there may be more among you who feel as I do. The sounds of England—the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill—the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land. The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the farm, and, above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening, or the smell of the scutch fires: that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were coming home with the result of the day's forage, when they were still nomads and when they were still roaming the forests and the plains of the Continent of Europe. These things strike down into the very depths of our nature and touch chords that go back to the beginning of time and the human race, but they are chords that with every year of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being.

Stanley Baldwin.

* * *

Can we not get out of our minds in industry, as we are trying in connection with national affairs, that absurd old-fashioned idea that fighting alone is the key to the problem of British industry?—Stanley Baldwin.