Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/368

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Make England stand supreme for aye

Because supreme for peace and good,

Warned well by wrecks of yesterday

That strongest feet may slip in blood!

Here, then, is why the men of the free nations of Greater Britain cast in their lot with ours when the Day came—because though we have stumbled too often and lost the way, we have still struggled back into it and moved, however haltingly, through all our divagations, towards a final goal of freedom and universal brotherhood, towards the ideal of a world ruled by love and not by terror. Neither now nor at any period have we made war our national industry; we have never at any period hammered our whole people into one vast army for the subjugation and enslavement of our neighbours. Whatever sin we have committed, we have never committed that sin. Our literature for centuries past testifies that though, the world being what it is, we have put our causes to the arbitrament of the sword, we have hated war, and the wrong and