Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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I have met clever people since that time who have solemnly accused Mr. Baldwin of deposing a King of England alone when the country was not looking. These people have simply forgotten. Now, when the bombers come every night to scatter careless death over our big cities and our little fields, when everybody's life is at stake and there is no telling every morning who of our lifelong friends may have died in the darkness, I am open to bet that not a tenth, not a twentieth of the tears are shed in any one week as were poured out all over the island on any day in that period of disillusion and bereavement in 1937.

Where the Government is concerned Auburn people have, I think, one other foible in common with many of their countrymen: they do not like to hear about dishonest politicians. In fact few things annoy them more than a tale of chicanery in Government circles, and they would far rather not know and put any shortcoming down to something else. In other countries, and among many of their compatriots, this peculiarity is often quite incomprehensible and usually passes for extreme stupidity or sentimentality. However, once one sees these men from our point of view--that is as grooms, so to speak, in charge of our most dignified and precious equine person--it is easy to realise the insult and the intolerable sense of shame which any perfidy on their part must produce in us. I do not say that most of us think this in so many words, but we feel it and react accordingly.