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For in spite of all temptation

To belong to another nation,

He remains an Englishman!

Deep in the heart of every English-speaking colonist is a chord which responds to the name of the parent people as to no other; and the depth of the emotion is curiously exemplified in the most insignificant matters. That seemingly imbecile passion which causes Colonials to drag down and retain as mementos the curtains of a bed on which a British princeling has slept; the comic manner in which the average colonist will gravely inquire of you on your return from Europe whether you have "seen the Queen," and their solemnity in all matters pertaining to ancient and almost worn-out English institutions, all have in them an element radically different from that which would animate the average home Englishman, were he to act in a like manner; an element not to be found in the sycophant crowds which loll open-mouthed about St. James's on the afternoon of a Drawing-room; and which is radically distinct from the servility which bows before mere wealth and success. The colonist is perhaps rather more inclined than others to criticize mercilessly the princeling or dignitary sent out from home (and does so very freely after his arrival, when his gilt has worn off him); but behind the individual man lies something of which he is the representative, and it is this which causes him to have for the colonist a quite peculiar value. The enthusiasm he awakens is an enthusiasm for an emblem, not a man; for the representative of English nationality, not for the ruler. The difference between the feeling of an Englishman in the colony and the Englishman at home, with regard to all the insignia and emblems of the common national life, forces itself strongly on the notice of one who visits England for the first time. There is an absence of the element of passion and romance in the "Man at Home's" way of viewing these things; the difference between these attitudes being best compared by likening it to the difference between the feelings of two men, one of whom remains in the house of his parents and possesses it, the other of whom leaves it for ever. If outside the house windows grows a great lilac tree, it is simply a material part of the house he inhabits to the man who possesses it. As long as the branches shade the window, or do not damage the walls, he regards it with passive approval; when they begin to obstruct the view, and the roots interfere with the foundations, he has not the slightest remorse in lopping off the branches, or, if need be, uprooting the whole tree; the whole house is still his, the tree he regards from the utilitarian standpoint. On the other hand, to the man who has left the home of his childhood and gone to a foreign land—if one should by any chance send him a sprig from the old tree that grew before the windows, he would wrap it up and carry it about buried in his breast—the small sprig is an emblem to him of the old home which once was his, and to which he is still bound by ties of affection, though severed for ever by space. It would be as irrelevant to accuse the one man of insensibility because he did not weep over the chopped-down branches, as to accuse the other of emotional weakness because he grew tender over his sprig. The Englishman in England needs no visible emblem of that national life in the centre of which he is imbedded, and of which he forms an integral part. To the Englishman separated from that life by wide space and material interests, the smallest representative of the old nation has a powerful emotional value. It is to him what the lock of his mistress's hair is to an absent lover; he treasures it and kisses it to assure himself of her existence. If she were present he would probably notice the lock little. The princeling is our lock of hair, the Union Jack our sprig of lilac.